How We Explain Behavior: The Attribution Theory

In social psychology, attribution is the process of inferring the causes of events or behaviors. Austrian psychologist Fritz Heider, father of attribution theory, defined it as a method of evaluating how people explain the origin of their own behavior and that of others.

Theories aside, in our day to day attribution is something we all do constantly, without any awareness of the underlying processes and biases that lead to our inferences. The attributions that we do on a daily basis are not something minor.

In this sense , we are prone to make internal or external attributions, depending on our personality or the influence that different factors have on us. Cognitive biases, for example, play an important role in this regard.

Heider’s attribution theory

In his book The Psychology of Interpersonal Relationships (1958), Heider suggested that people observe others to analyze their behavior. In addition, he postulated that they reach their own conclusions to explain the meaning of the actions they observe.

Heider’s attribution theory tries to analyze how we explain people’s behavior and life events. In social psychology this is called the attributive process. For Heider, we tend to attribute the behavior of others to one of two possible causes: an internal cause or an external cause.

Internal causes or internal attributions refer to individual characteristics and traits, such as personality traits, intelligence, motivation, etc. External causes or external attributions are those that are granted to situational forces, such as luck, meteorological weather or the actions of third parties.

Jones and Davis Corresponding Interference Theory

In 1965, Edward Jones and Keith Davis suggested that people make inferences about others when actions are intentional, and not accidental, in their corresponding interference theory. The goal of this theory is to explain why people give internal or external attributions.

According to this theory, when people see others act in a certain way, they look for a correspondence between motives and their behaviors. In this way, the inferences we make would be based on the degree of choice, the probability of the behavior occurring, and the effects of that behavior.

Weiner’s motivational model

Weiner’s theory, derived from Heider’s work, is an integrative model of causal ascriptions and the cognitive, affective and behavioral effects that attributions can have.

Weiner developed the theory of attribution to explain the association between causal inference and success and academic failure. To do this, he focused on identifying the differences in the needs and performance of people when they think about their successes or failures.

Weiner’s (1986) motivational model explains achievement behavior through the causal attributions perceived by people in previous achievement results. Put more simply, success would be related to how people have explained their previous successes.

This theory relates expectations for the future with the stability of the attributions made. Thus, the more stable attributions support the expectations of obtaining the same result in the future, while the more unstable attributions produce changes in expectations about the future result.

Thus, if we think that our success was due to a moment of inspiration, we will assume that the probability of repeating it is less than if we assume that it occurred because we are intelligent people. Inspiration comes and goes, intelligence is “always with us.”

Kelley’s covariation model

Harol Kelley approaches the study of attributive validity to explain how people decide that their impressions of an object are correct. According to Kelley’s model of variation, people make causal inferences to explain why other people behave in a certain way.

This way of making attributions has to do with social perception and self-perception. According to this model, the causes of an outcome can be attributed to the person (internal), the stimulus (external), the circumstance, or some combination of these factors.

Criteria and attributions

Thus, attributions are made on the basis of three criteria : consensus, distinctiveness and consistency.

• Consensus : there is “consensus” when most of all people respond to the stimulus or situation, in the same way as the person observed.
• Distinctive character : when the observed person responds differently to other stimuli or similar situations.
• Consistency : when the person always responds in the same way or similar to the stimulus or situation considered.

Thus, based on these three parameters, it established three types of attributions.

• ” High consensus / high distinctiveness / high consistency”: it is the end of the behavior that makes the person act like this.
• ” Low consensus / low distinctiveness / high consistency”: it is the personal characteristics that make the person act this way.

• ” Low consensus / high distinctiveness / low consistency”: it is the circumstances surrounding the decision that make the subject act like this.

Whether following one model or another, the truth is that no person deprives himself of the “pleasure” of trying to explain his behavior and those of others. This is so because doing this task well gives us a great advantage to operate in the world, since we understand that a correct attribution will make us more skillful when it comes to predicting results and actions.