Monday, November 7, 2011

Correspondence Bias and HoN Griefing


“The correspondence bias is the tendency to draw inferences about a person's unique and enduring dispositions from behaviors that can be entirely explained by the situations in which they occur.” –American Psychological Association, 1995.
 Translation: People tend to overestimate internal factors and underestimate external factors. You often blame others for their faults regardless of the situation. You think you’re better than you really are, and that you are never, ever wrong.

Being a college student, I have had the privilege of taking general education courses. While I was sitting in my Social Psychology class today, my professor began to ramble on about the correspondence bias. Instead of applying it to the normal things that I am sure my classmates were thinking about, I began to think about all the people in HoN who blame their teammates and never themselves when things go wrong.

 "Elitist." "A**hole." "Ignorant f***." All these words describe this character that we have come to know so well when playing public matchmaking. Even I will admit to being this character from time to time, although I have been trying to learn about that EU chill that we all know and love.  Let us take a deeper look into the four factors that make up the aforementioned correspondence bias.

1.       Lack of Awareness

Let’s assume that the elitist we talked about is in the middle lane and you die in your sidelane/jungle. He has almost no clue how it happened, but because it happened it is your fault. If we do not know why a person acts as he does, we attribute his behavior to him and not the unique situation or environment he finds himself in. Therefore, according to the griefing elitist, your death is always your fault and yours alone. I'm sure the griefing elitist will let you hear about it.

 2.      Unrealistic Expectations

Just as this elitist expects to dominate the game with his awesomely amazing talent, he expects you to follow suit. Any performance less than that of his will be considered inferior. Once again, you will hear about it...

3.      Inflated Categorizations

After explaining yourself to the elitist, who should now have a better understanding of what went down, you would expect his grudge to be forgotten. However, this is not the case due to his inflated categorizations. The situation you find yourself in will be enough cause for him to complain. You will begin to hear quotes such as but not limited to “It’s your fault he’s fed, deal with it.” This is often an impossible task after getting behind.

4.      Incomplete Corrections

The bias will continue to occur whenever there is a mismatch between the elitist's expectations and the other player’s behavior. If the observer, the elitist, calculates the value of either of these elements, a mismatch will occur which will result in non-stop (for lack of a better term) b****ing.

Well this was my rant for the day. I am going to try to post a blog every Monday and Friday, or maybe whenever I feel like it. I did some amateur broadcasting last night for the
Cyber Sports Network with Fourcourtjester (the links are on my Facebook page). If you have any suggestions for topics you would like for me to discuss, send me a tweet! Twitter.com/peterpandam.

QOTD: Does being yelled at by the so-called elitist help or hurt your in-game performance?

7 comments:

  1. i dont really care much for the elitists yelling, usually i just ignore them, or outsmart them with overwhelming logic until he shuts up

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  2. the elitist should always point out the faults of others, how else are these noobs gunna learn!?!?!!?

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  3. Looks like you've hit a soft spot in 3 of the 4 comments above.

    Maybe the next blog post should focus on the players who derive their enjoyment from petty trash talking and deliberate grieving when they decide their team is sub par in their elitist minds.

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  4. Well, he did say this blog was directed towards "public matchmaking" didn't he?

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  5. It effects my gameplay sorta. If I have a really bad game and my team is four friends who are flaming (Or just 4 randoms blaming me, when it's not only me, but them as well who fails), one of two things happen.

    1. I get pissed, ignore them and farms the rest of the game (If its really hopeless and they just keep flaming)
    2. I get pissed, but since the game is not lost i do my best to prove them wrong - and often do some big plays
    3. I get insecure, starts do hesitate every time there is something just a little risky, since I obviously dont want to get flamed again (Mostly when four friends)

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  6. 4. They fail over and over again, while I'm the one keeping us in the game. The usually says something like "OMFG IM SO BAD" - they often ignore it, as they know they were wrong, which is good enough for me :)

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    ReplyDelete