Attributional Processes: Psychological

Abstract

Attribution is primarily the process of ascribing a cause to an event or explaining the event. Secondarily, the term ‘attribution’ refers to certain inferences or judgments, such as inferences of personality traits from behavior and judgments of responsibility and blame. Psychological research on attribution was inspired by Heider (1958), who argued that the social perceiver makes sense of the world by attributing behaviors and events to their underlying causes. The rise of empirical attribution research in the 1960s and 1970s was sparked by a focusing and narrowing of Heider's broad model of social perception, generating two main strands of research: attribution as trait inference and attribution as causal explanation. The first strand began with Jones and Davis (1965). They took Heider's idea that people infer intentions from behavior a step further by developing a model of ‘correspondent inferences’ from a given intentional behavior (‘he acted friendly’) not just to a corresponding intention but to a corresponding trait (‘he is friendly’). The second strand began with Kelley (1967) who developed Heider's insight that causal judgments are pivotal in social perception, Kelley proposed that such judgments are based on a simple information processing rule: people infer those causes that covary with the event in question. Kelley's covariation theory profoundly influenced attribution research by assuming that (a) people break down causes into internal attributions (something about the agent) and external attributions (something about the situation) and (b) that the internal–external dichotomy generally applies to all behaviors and events alike. Recent theoretical developments emphasize, by contrast, that ordinary people sharply distinguish between (a) attributing intentional actions to the actor's reasons and motives and (b) attributing unintentional behaviors (e.g., failure, depression) to causal factors internal or external to the agent. This approach considers behavior explanations an integral part of people's theory of mind, which views people as intentional agents who act in light of their beliefs and desires. One advantage of this approach lies in its compatibility with work on responsibility attribution, which also takes into account the intentionality of the behavior in question. Another advantage lies in the integration of social-psychological work on explanations with developmental research on children's emerging theory of mind as well as with philosophical analysis of the properties and evolution of folk psychology. A further development suggests that attributions are not just cognitive processes but rather communicative acts. Thus, behavior explanations are altered for impression-management purposes, are responsive to an interlocutor's interest and concerns, and have an immediate impact on others' perceptions and evaluations of the explainer and the agent whose behavior is being explained.