Attribution (psychology) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

"I think heartworm prevention 

is 

nothing but a scam.  

I know a dog that was never on heartworm prevention 

and 

it lived to be eighteen years old."

~(Client at Pets Are People, Too)

"It's 

like driving home from a party 

under 

the influence of alchohol.  

Just 

because you made it home safely...

doesn't 

mean you should have done it."

~(James E. Avery, DVM)~

"We're not interested in the other vaccines; just the rabies vaccine.  Fluffy never leaves the house."

~(Client at Pets Are People, Too)~

"Fluffy's not at home...

now."

~(James E. Avery, DVM)~

Attribution (psychology) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: Attribution is a concept in social psychology addressing the processes by which individuals explain the causes of behavior and events; attribution theory is an umbrella term for various models that attempt to explain those processes. Psychological research into attribution began with the work of Fritz Heider in the early part of the 20th century, subsequently developed by others such as Harold Kelley and Bernard Weiner.


Correspondent inferences state that people make inferences about a person when his or her actions are freely chosen, are unexpected, and result in a small number of desirable effects. According to Edward E. Jones and Keith Davis’ Correspondent Inference Theory, people make correspondent inferences by reviewing the context of behavior. It describes how people try to find out individual’s personal characteristics from the behavioral evidence. People make inferences on the basis of three factors; degree of choice, expectedness of behavior, and effects of someone’s behaviors.

Co-variation principle states that people attribute behavior to the factors that are present when a behavior occurs and absent when it does not. Thus, the theory assumes that people make causal attributions in a rational, logical fashion, and that they assign the cause of an action to the factor that co-varies most closely with that action. Harold Kelley's covariation model of Attribution looks to three main types of information from which to make an attribution decision about an individual's behavior. The first is consensus information, or information on how other people in the same situation and with the same stimulus behave. The second is distinctive information, or how the individual responds to different stimuli. The third is consistency information, or how frequent the individual's behavior can be observed with similar stimulus but varied situations. From these three sources of information observers make attribution decisions on the individual's behavior as either internal or external. Kelly’s theory and the examples of prediction are represented in the diagram.

The diagram also reveal several levels in the covariation model: high and low. Each of these levels influence the three covariation model criteria. High consensus is when many people can agree on an event or area of interest. Low consensus is when very few people can agree. High distinctiveness is when the event or area of interest is very unusual, whereas low distinctness is when the event or area of interest is fairly common. High consistency is when the event or area of interest continues for a length of time and low consistency is when the event or area of interest goes away quickly.

Bernard Weiner proposed that individuals have initial affective responses to the potential consequences of the intrinsic or extrinsic motives of the actor, which in turn influence future behavior. That is, a person's own perceptions or attributions as to why they succeeded or failed at an activity determine the amount of effort the person will engage in activities in the future. Weiner suggests that individuals exert their attribution search and cognitively evaluate casual properties on the behaviors they experience. When attributions lead to positive affect and high expectancy of future success, such attributions should result in greater willingness to approach to similar achievement tasks in the future than those attributions that produce negative affect and low expectancy of future success. Eventually, such affective and cognitive assessment influences future behavior when individuals encounter similar situations.

Weiner's achievement attribution has three categories:

1.  stable theory (stable and unstable)
2.  locus of control (internal and external)
3.  controllability (controllable or uncontrollable)

Stability influences individuals' expectancy about their future; control is related with individuals' persistence on mission; causality influences emotional responses to the outcome of task.

Bias and errors in attributions

While people strive to find reasons for behaviors, they fall into many traps of biases and errors. As Fritz Heider says, “our perceptions of causality are often distorted by our needs and certain cognitive biases”. The following are examples of attributional biases.

Fundamental attribution error


The fundamental attribution error describes the tendency to overvalue dispositional or personality-based explanations for behavior while under-valuing situational explanations. The fundamental attribution error is most visible when people explain and assume the behavior of others. For example, if a person is overweight, a person’s first assumption might be that they have a problem with overeating or are lazy and not that they might have a medical reason for being heavier set.

Culture bias

People in individualist cultures, generally Anglo-America and Anglo-Saxon European societies, value individuals, personal goals, and independence. People in collectivist cultures see individuals as members of groups such as families, tribes, work units, and nations, and tend to value conformity and interdependence. This cultural trait is common in Asia, traditional native American societies, and Africa.

Research shows that culture, either individualist or collectivist, affects how people make attributions.

People from individualist cultures are more inclined to make fundamental-attribution error than people from collectivist cultures. Individualist cultures tend to attribute a person’s behavior to his internal factors whereas collectivist cultures tend to attribute a person’s behavior to his external factors.

Research suggests that individualist cultures engage in self-serving bias more than do collectivist cultures, i.e. individualist cultures tend to attribute success to internal factors and to attribute failure to external factors. In contrast, collectivist cultures engage in the opposite of self-serving bias i.e. self-effacing bias, which is: attributing success to external factors and blaming failure on internal factors (the individual).

People tend to attribute other people’s behaviors to their dispositional factors while attributing own actions to situational factors.  Basically, even in the same situation, people’s attribution can differ depending on their role(actor or observer).  The actor/observer bias is used less frequently with people one knows well such as friends and family since one knows how his/her close friends and family will behave in certain situation, leading him/her to think more about the external factors rather than internal factors.


Defensive attribution hypothesis

The defensive attribution hypothesis is a social psychological term referring to a set of beliefs held by an individual with the function of defending themselves from concern that they will be the cause or victim of a mishap. Commonly, defensive attributions are made when individuals witness or learn of a mishap happening to another person. In these situations, attributions of responsibility to the victim or harm-doer for the mishap will depend upon the severity of the outcomes of the mishap and the level of personal and situational similarity between the individual and victim. More responsibility will be attributed to the harm-doer as the outcome becomes more severe, and as personal or situational similarity decreases.

An example of defensive attribution is the just-world hypothesis, which is where "good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people". People believe in this in order to avoid feeling vulnerable to situations that they have no control over. However, this also leads to blaming the victim even in a tragic situation.

Another example of defensive attribution is optimism bias, in which people believe positive events happen to them more often than to others and that negative events happen to them less often than to others. Too much optimism leads people to ignore some warnings and precautions given to them. For example, smokers believe that they are less likely to get lung cancer than other smokers.

Learned helplessness

Learned helplessness was first found in animals when psychologists Martin Seligman and Steven F. Maier discovered that the classically conditioned dogs that got electrical shocks made no attempt to escape the situation. The dogs were placed in a box divided into two sections by a low barrier. Since one side of the box was electrified and the other was not, the dogs could easily avoid electrical shocks by hopping to the other side. However, the dogs just stayed in the electrified side, helpless to change the situation.  This learned helplessness also applies to human beings. People feel helpless when they feel powerless to change their situation. This happens when people attribute negative results to their internal, stable and global factors leading them to think they have no control over their situation. Making no attempt to avoid or better the situation will often exacerbate the situations that people are faced with, and may lead to clinical depression and related mental illnesses.
Perceptual salience and attribution

^{When people try to make attributions about another's behavior, their information focuses on the individual. Their perception of that individual is lacking most of the external factors which might affect the individual. The gaps tend to be skipped over and the attribution is made based on the perception information most salient. The most salient perceptual information dominates a person's perception of the situation.}

For individuals making behavioral attributions about themselves, the situation and external environment are entirely salient, but their own body and behavior are less so. This leads to the tendency to make an external attribution in regards to their own behavior.

Criticism

Attribution theory has been criticized as being mechanistic and reductionist for assuming that people are rational, logical and systematic thinkers.  It turns out however that they are cognitive misers and motivated tacticians as demonstrated by the fundamental attribution error. It also fails to address the social, cultural and historical factors that shape attributions of cause. This has been addressed extensively by discourse analysis, a branch of psychology that prefers to use qualitative methods including the use of language to understand psychological phenomena. The linguistic categorization theory for example demonstrates how language influences our attribution style.