Attribution Theory

Understanding causality and responsibility is at the base of interpreting social behavior, and attribution theory explains how we assess the causes of behavior, both our own and others'. In sense making, interactants reason “backward” from observed behavior to determine underlying causes, so that they may know how to proceed in specific interactions and predict future behavior.

Although primarily used to examine interpersonal processing, attribution theory has been applied in other contexts. For example, Timothy Coombs revised attribution theory definitions and concepts to apply to organizations and examined perceptions of crises and their impact on reputation. With unexpected events, such as crises, individuals strive to explain causes. If an organization is seen as responsible for an event, its reputation sustains damage. When conditions of stability (i.e., a history of such problems) and control are believed to exist, organizations are likely to be seen as responsible. Thus, attribution theory has promise for organizational and public relations research.

Three assumptions undergird attribution theory: (1) individuals assign causes to behavior they observe, (2) individuals use systematic processes in explaining behavior, and (3) once attributions are made, they influence feelings and subsequent behavior.

There are two types of attributions, internal and external. Internal attributions place the cause for behavior within a person, whereas external attributions assign the cause to some factor outside the person. In other words, internal attributions focus on some aspect of a person, including stable traits or characteristics, such as intelligence or personality; variable behaviors, such as effort; and temporary states, such as mood or exhaustion. Locating the cause outside the person, external attributions place responsibility on some force or agent in the situation or environment. Such agents include rules and restrictions, difficulty of tasks, availability of resources, and chance or luck.

Much research has examined factors affecting the choice between internal and external attributions. For example, Fritz Heider discussed differences in self versus other attributions. Individuals tend to attribute responsibility for their own failures to external causes (e.g., bad luck) and the failures of [Page 48]others to internal causes (e.g., lack of intelligence), and to attribute responsibility for their own successes to internal qualities (e.g., intelligence) and the successes of others to external factors (e.g., good luck).

Widely regarded as the father of attribution theory, Heider said that like “naïve psychologists,” people work to interpret human behavior—to understand why people behave as they do. Because many interpretations of a given behavior are possible, he argued that we start to recognize individual patterns of perception, labeled “perceptual styles.” Heider's theory is regarded as the first attribution theory, and it has spawned considerable theoretical extension and research.

Most research in attribution theory has revolved around two models, Harold Kelley's and Bernard Weiner's. Kelley's model, or Kelley's cube, is especially concerned with attributions regarding the behavior of others and has been the “primary paradigm for describing how people use information to make social attributions for the behavior and outcomes of others” (Martinko & Thomson, 1998, p. 271). Weiner's work, involving the achievementmotivation model, is focused on self-attributions.

Although recognizing self-attribution, Kelley's work primarily covers attributions made to explain the behavior of others. Two tenets underlie this work. One is the covariation principle, employed with multiple instances of behavior, which asserts that “an effect is attributed to the one of its possible causes with which, over time, it covaries” (Kelley, 1973, p. 108). That is, when an observer has more than one instance of behavior to evaluate, the observer assesses which outcomes covary (i.e., are associated) with particular causes. The other is the discounting effect, used for single instances of observed behavior, which suggests that “the role of a given cause in producing a given effect is discounted if other plausible causes are also present” (Kelley, 1973, p. 113). That is, observers assess possible causes relative to one another. These tenets assume rationality where behavior and varying possibilities are carefully examined.

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