Attribution Theory

Conceptual Overview

The roots of attribution theory can be traced to the work of Fritz Heider in the 1950s. Heider asserted that people have an inherent need to understand and control their environments, and he described individuals [Page 80]as naive psychologists trying to ascertain explain and understand the causes of significant events. He believed that the ability to understand causation was a necessary component of the ability to survive and thrive in a complicated environment. Following Heider, Jones, Nesbitt, Kelley, and Weiner were among the key figures who more fully articulated the process of how people form attributions and how attributions affect emotions, expectancies, and behavior.

Two models have dominated the articulation and development of attributional perspectives: Kelley's cube and Weiner's achievement model of motivation. Kelley's cube focuses on the social attribution process and describes how observers use information to make attributions about the outcomes of others. More specifically, he asserted that people use consensus, consistency, and distinctiveness information to determine whether the cause of an outcome is due to the person, the situation, or the entity, which is the result of the unique interaction between the situation and the person. Consensus information is concerned with whether other people act the same way in the same situation. If they do not and the actor's behavior is unique (i.e., low in consensus), the cause of the outcome is likely to be attributed to the internal characteristics of the person. Consistency information is concerned with whether the actor acts the same way regardless of the situation. If the behavior is high in consistency, it is considered to be the result of stable causes.

Finally, distinctiveness is concerned with whether the behavior is unique in a particular situation (high distinctiveness) or tends to be demonstrated in most situations (low distinctiveness). This information helps the observer determine whether the cause is specific and is the unique product of the interaction between the individual and the situation, or if the cause is global and likely to affect a wide range of situations. Kelley proposed that these three dimensions of information were the primary inputs to determining whether the causes of the outcomes were attributed to the person, the situation, or the entity, which is the result of the unique interaction of the individual with the situation. Thus, Kelley's primary contribution focused on how individuals use information to make social attributions about the causes of events.

Weiner's achievement motivation model focuses more on the consequences of attributions and describes how attributional explanations and the dimensions of these explanations affect individuals' expectancies, emotions, and behavior. Explanations can be defined as the reasons people give for an outcome (i.e., a success or failure experience). Typical attributional explanations are ability, effort, the situation, and luck. The dimensions of explanations are the underlying cognitive structure of the explanations. Locus of causality is a dimension that is concerned with whether or not a cause is internal or external. Both ability and effort are explanations that are usually classified as internal. The nature of the task and luck are usually classified as external causes.

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