Attribution Motivation: Road Rage Incident In Detroit

When looking at the questions of motivation, one must look at all sides of those involved. There is a great tendency to misattribute the motivation of people, based on our own preconceptions. As written about in our primary text, the actor-observer bias causes us to attribute motivations of others to more dispositional reasons, whereas the other person usually sees them as situational (Petri and Govern, 2013). For my analysis of a current event in the context of attribution motivation, I have chosen a road rage incident in Detroit. An automobile painter was shot and killed by a fellow motorist while driving in Detroit. The other motorist was stopped on the street and blocking the road. The painter told him to move. After an argument, the painter reentered his vehicle and left. The painter was then followed by the other motorist who eventually shot him in the chest. …show more content…
There are several identifiable behaviors that inherently are motivated. The first one is the driving. His travel in the area was motivated by, as mentioned in the article, the need to get the down payment for a job he was supposed to do. His reason for driving down this particular street may have been precipitated by the location of his destination or traffic patterns. Both of these are situational motivations. With driving in traffic, with barriers, traffic controls such as stop signs, one way streets, and speed regulations there are fewer and fewer dispositional attributions. His dispositional attribution was that of following the law.
Why, then, did he get out of his vehicle to confront the other motorist? This is where the actor-observer bias starts to come into effect. On one hand, one could argue that the motorist was blocking his way and it was merely this situation that caused the painter to confront him. On the other hand, it could be argued that the painter’s disposition (perhaps as argumentative or confrontational) caused him to start the