Suppose your new coworker didn’t greet you at work. How would you perceive that moment then? Would you simply consider them rude? Or would you think that perhaps they are shy and reserved? What if a student from your class scores low on a test? Would you believe it was their fault that they didn’t study enough? Or perhaps that they had some issues? In reality, this perception that we have of other people’s actions is the process of attribution. This is a pervasive and predominant phenomenon of everyday life and is an important process that determines human behaviour in social situations.
Read More: The Social Brain: Neuroscience of Human Connection and Mental Health
What is Attribution?
Attribution is “an inference regarding the cause of a person’s behaviour or an interpersonal event.” -(APA, 2018) “Attribution theory deals with how the social perceiver uses information to arrive at causal explanations for events. It examines what information is gathered and how it is combined to form a causal judgment.” (Fiske & Taylor, 1991). In simple words, it is a process through which we seek to identify the causes of one’s behaviour. All individuals have some kind of attribution about everyone. In fact, attribution, to a great degree, determines how we see, judge or feel towards a particular person or situation.
Theoretical Approaches to Understanding Attribution
1. Correspondent Inference Theory:
This was the first theory to attempt to explain attribution, proposed by Jones and Davis (1965). This theory says that we tend to make inferences about people based on the intentions behind one’s actions (Gerace, 2020). We tend to make inferences on unusual or unexpected behaviours more than actions that are socially desirable or an accepted form of behaviour. However, this theory focused too much on internal dispositions and failed to discuss situational factors that may affect attribution. Further, it fails to explain the errors in it.
2. Kelly’s Covariation Model
Kelly (1967 suggested that judgment of an action should be based on both internal as well as external factors. Here, covariation simply means the availability of multiple information and observation sources across different time periods that help one examine the variations between reasons and observations. He emphasised three kinds of evidence for identifying a behaviour. These are:
- Consensus: This refers to the extent to which others react to a situation or a stimulus in a similar pattern. E.g.: If a child disrupts class, does every child cause the disruption?
- Consistency: The extent to which the action or behaviour is the same in that situation. E.g., Does the child always disrupt this class?
- Distinctiveness: The extent to which the action or behaviour is repeated in other situations. E.g., Does the child disrupt every class, or is it particularly limited to this class only?
Based on these factors, we can attribute whether the child is naturally disruptive or if the particular situation (this teacher’s class) is the cause of the disruption.
3. Weiner’s Theory
This theory, established by Bernard Weiner, went a step further in understanding attribution by emphasising how an attribution affects the person forming it towards others. It tries to understand attribution through motivation and achievement. People’s attribution of successes and failures depends on these dimensions:
- Locus of causality: This determines whether the individual attributes their success or failure to internal factors such as abilities, knowledge and skills or external factors such as the situation, luck, etc.
- Stability: This checks whether the cause remains constant and stable or unstable over a period of time.
- Controllability: This is to check whether the factor is within one’s control, such as the skills necessary or not. (Weiner, 1985, 1992)
What Are The Errors in Attribution?
Attribution is inherently the perception we have or form about an individual’s behaviour. Naturally, this perception can be affected by our own biases and errors in perception. Here are a few common errors in the attribution process:
1. Fundamental Attribution Error
Also called the correspondence bias (Gilbert & Malone, 1995), the term was coined by Lee Ross in 1977 based on the work of Jones & Harris (1967. This is a form of cognitive bias that refers to the tendency to highlight dispositional or internal factors over the influence of one’s environment when attributing to other people. E.g., if someone is late to class, one might just think that this person is naturally careless and irresponsible about the possibility of being stuck in traffic.
2. Actor-Observer Bias
This phenomenon is the work of Jones & Nisbett (1971. It refers to the tendency of individuals to attribute others’ behaviours to internal or dispositional factors, but one’s own to environmental factors, especially in the context of negative outcomes (Bordens & Horowitz, 2002). E.g., If someone else scores low, it was their own fault that they didn’t study, but if the same happens with the individual, it was probably because they didn’t get to study, or the teacher did strict checking.
3. Self-Serving Bias
This is the tendency to attribute positive outcomes to one’s own disposition while negative ones to external or situational factors. This plays an important role in protecting one’s self-esteem (Myers, 2015) by blaming things that are “out of control” for the individual. E.g., If a person scores well in an exam, it is because they studied well. However, if they did not, it was because their teacher did strict checking or didn’t teach the topic well enough.
Conclusion
Attribution is an integral part of social psychology that determines not only how we see and perceive the world, but in turn, makes sense of how we respond and make judgments of different actions and behaviours. There are various theories, such as the correspondent inference theory, Kelly’s covariation model and Weiner’s attribution theory, which try to determine why or on what basis we make these attributions.
However, while attribution helps us understand the world better, it can often be influenced by certain cognitive biases such as the actor-observer effect, self-serving bias and fundamental attribution error, which determine whether we make positive or negative attribution in a given situation. Recognising these errors and rectifying them through active involvement in understanding ourselves and the society better can be a nuanced way of understanding people and the causes behind their behaviours.
FAQs
1. What is Attribution?
Attribution is a process through which we try to identify and explain the causes behind people’s behaviours and actions.
2. What are some theories of attribution?
Correspondent inference theory, Kelly’s covariation model and Weiner’s attribution are some of the most popular theories in understanding the attribution process.
3. What are some errors in attribution?
Some common errors in the attribution process involve the actor-observer effect, self-serving bias and fundamental attribution error.
References +
Gerace A. Internal and external attributions. In: Zeigler-Hill V, Shackelford TK, eds. Encyclopedia of Personality and Individual Differences. Springer International Publishing; 2020:2328-2334. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-24612-3_2301
Self-serving bias https://thedecisionlab.com/biases/self-serving-bias
Higgins, N. C., & LaPointe, M. R. P. (2012). An individual differences measure of attributions that affect achievement behaviour. SAGE Open, 2(4). https://doi.org/10.1177/2158244012470110
Fundamental attribution error https://positivepsychology.com/fundamental-attribution-error
Attribution definition https://dictionary.apa.org/attribution
Attribution theory
https://www.simplypsychology.org/attribution-theory.html
Attribution theory https://www.instructionaldesign.org/theories/attribution-theory/#google_vignette
Attribution social psychology https://www.verywellmind.com/attribution-social-psychology-2795898
