Final answer:
Attribution theory deals with how individuals explain their successes and failures, often influenced by self-serving biases and the fundamental attribution error.
Step-by-step explanation:
Attribution theory focuses on how individuals explain their success and failure, highlighting how people tend to attribute outcomes to different causes. These causes can be broadly categorized as either dispositional (internal) or situational (external).
Following an outcome, self-serving biases are attributions that allow individuals to see themselves in a favorable light, such as attributing success to internal factors like intelligence, and failures to external factors like external difficulty. This bias is culture-dependent and serves to protect self-esteem.
The fundamental attribution error is a concept within attribution theory that describes the tendency to overemphasize dispositional factors and underemphasize situational factors when explaining the behavior of others. This error varies across cultures, being more prominent in individualistic cultures compared to collectivistic cultures, where situational factors are given more consideration.