Attribution Theory

Definition

Attribution theory—or rather, a family of attribution theories—is concerned with the question of how ordinary people explain human behavior. One type of attribution theory emphasizes people's use of folk psychology to detect and understand internal states such as goals, desires, or intentions. People then use these inferred states to explain the behavior they observe. Another type of attribution theory assumes that people observe regularities and differences in behavior to learn about dispositions (e.g., personality traits, attitudes) that are characteristic of themselves or others. Attribution theories pose a challenge to academic efforts to account for behavior that either fail to explain the individual behaviors of individual people or that deny the usefulness of folk psychological (or mentalistic) concepts. Attribution theories are complemented by what is sometimes called attributional theories. These theories address the consequences of particular attributions for emotions (e.g., anger vs. pity), judgments (e.g., of guilt vs. innocence), and behavior (e.g., aggression vs. assistance).

Attribution as Perception

In 1958, Fritz Heider introduced an early version of attribution theory at a time when behaviorist theories of learning and memory and psychoanalytic theories of unconscious motivation dominated academic psychology. These theories had little use for naive explanations of behavior. In contrast, Heider stressed the importance of studying everyday attributions because they influence how people feel and what they do.

Heider made two important distinctions. The first distinction was whether a behavior is seen as intentional or unintentional; the second distinction was whether a behavior is seen as caused by something about the person or by something about the situation. These two distinctions are related because intentional behaviors say more about the person than about the situation. Heider anticipated that people regard personal attributions as most important. Individualist cultures, in particular, foster a tendency to see humans as autonomous agents who have some control over their own behavior. Once they have made a personal attribution, people can predict a person's future behavior more confidently. Suppose Ringo repays a loan from Paul on time. If Paul concludes that Ringo is trustworthy, he may help him again when the need arises, or feel comfortable to trust Ringo in other ways, as when confiding a piece of gossip about George.

The repayment of a loan is likely seen as an intentional act, especially when there are no signs that the person was coerced. Heider suggested that an attribution of intentionality can be made with little thought, much like the visual perception of objects is largely automatic. In social perception, the person and the behavior form a perceptual unit, and thereby suggest a causal connection. Experiments have shown that the observation of a behavior that implies a certain personality trait (such as the timely repayment of a loan suggests trustworthiness) makes that trait mentally accessible. If, for example, people read about a repaid loan and a host of other behaviors, seeing the word trustworthy at a later time helps them recall the specific behavior that suggested it.

Whereas the person–behavior unit is figural in social perception, the situation is usually the background. Compared with a person, a situation is typically not well organized perceptually. It can comprise the presence of other people, current moods, the weather, or the time of day. Only when a particular aspect of a situation commands attention, such as the threat of penalties in the loan example, can situational attributions become more prominent.

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