ATTRIBUTION THEORY
1.
Name of Theory: Attribution Theory
2.
Originator(s) and Professional Background:
Attribution theory was developed overtime from the theories of Fritz Heider, Edward
Jones, Keith Davis, and Harold Kelley. All were social psychologists. Edward 'Ned'
Jones was born August 11, 1926 in Buffalo, NY. He received his doctorate degree from
Harvard University in 1953. He taught at Duke University in the psychology department
and was chair of the department from 1970-73. He was on both the National Science
Foundation and National Institute of Mental Health's advisory boards. He has written
several books including Foundations of Social Psychology.
3.
Institution(s) with which identified:
Harold Kelley was at the University of California and most of his research involving
attribution theory was funded by the National Science Foundation. Edward Jones spent
his entire career at the Duke University.
4.
Purpose of the theory:
Attribution theory is about how people make causal explanations; about how they answer
questions beginning with "why?" The theory deals with the information they use in
making causal inferences, and with what they do with this information to answer causal
questions. The theory developed within social psychology as a means of dealing with
questions of social perception. For instance, if a person is aggressively competitive in
his/her behavior, is s/he this kind of person, or is s/he reacting to situational pressures. If
a person fails a test, does s/he have low ability, or is the test difficult? In both examples,
the questions concern the causes of observed behavior and the answers of interest are
those given by the man on the street. This is why Heider refers to attribution theory as
"naïve" psychology. Attribution theory describes the processes of explaining events and
the behavioral and emotional consequences of those explanations.
5.
Approximate year of origin:
Heider first wrote about attribution theory in his book The Psychology of Interpersonal
Relationships (1958) which played a central role in the origination and definition of
attribution theory. Jones and Davis' systematic hypotheses about the perception of
intention was published in 1965 in the essay "From Acts to Dispositions." Kelley
published "Attribution in Social Psychology" in 1967.
6. Circumstances that led to model development: In the 1970s the field of social psychology
was dominated by attribution theorists and researchers. "Attribution theory came to rival
cognitive dissonance as one of the most imperialistic theories in social psychology. Attribution
theory was seen as relevant to the study of person perception, event perception, attitude change,
the acquisition of self-knowledge, therapeutic interventions, and much more" (Ross and Fletcher,
1986). Attribution theory emerged from Heider's (1958) "naïve" or "lay" psychology and
subsequent reformulations by Jones and Davis (1965) and Kelley (1967). Heider postulated a set
of rules of inference by which the ordinary person might attribute responsibility to another
person (an "actor") for an action. Heider distinguished between internal and external attributions,
arguing that both personal forces and environmental factors operate on the "actor," and the
balance of these determines the attribution of responsibility (Lewis and Daltroy, 1990). Kelley
(1967) advanced Heider's theory by adding hypotheses about the factors that affect the formation
of attributions: consistency, distinctiveness, and consensus.
7. Key terms:
1. Attributions - the causes individuals generate to make sense of their world.
2. Consistency - the degree to which the actor performs that same behavior toward an object
on different occasions.
3. Distinctiveness - the degree to which the actor performs different behaviors with different
objects.
4. Consensus - the degree to which other actors perform the same behavior with the same
object.
8. Description of Attribution Theory:
Heider's "Naive" Psychology: Heider believe that people act on the basis of their beliefs.
Therefore, beliefs must be taken into account if psychologists were to account for human
behavior. This would be true whether the beliefs were valid or not. Heider also suggested that
you could learn a great deal from commonsense psychology. He stressed the importance of
taking the ordinary person's explanations and understanding of events and behaviors seriously.
Correspondent Inference Theory: Jones & Davis described how an "alert perceiver" might
infer another's intentions and personal dispositions (personality traits, attitudes, etc.) from his or
her behavior. Perceivers make correspondent inferences when they infer another's personal
dispositions directly from behavior; for example, perceivers may infer a disposition of kindness
from a kindly act. Inferences are correspondent when the behavior and the disposition can be
assigned similar labels (e.g. kind).
Kelley's Model of Attribution Theory: Kelley's theory is not limited to interpersonal
perception. His theory concerns the subjective experience of attributional validity. He asks the
question: "How do individuals establish the validity of their own or of another person's
impression of an object?"
Kelley suggested that perceivers examine three different kinds of information in their efforts to
establish validity (Ross and Fletcher, 1985):
Consensus information - do all or only a few people respond to the stimulus in the same way as
the target person?
Distinctiveness information - does the target person respond in the same way to other stimuli as
well?
Consistency information - does the target person always respond in the same way to this
stimulus?
Three combinations of this information:
1. High consensus, high distinctiveness, high consistency: The target person's judgment
of the restaurant (it is a good restaurant) should be perceived as valid if the perceiver
knows that 1) other people like the restaurant, 2) the target person seldom likes
restaurants, and 3) the target person enjoys the restaurant every time he or she goes there.
The restaurant is good.
2. Low consensus, low distinctiveness, high consistency: If a perceiver knows that 1)
most people do not like the target person's restaurant, 2) the target person likes most
restaurants and 3) the target person enjoys the restaurant each time s/he goes there. Target
person's enjoyment at restaurant attributable to something about him/her (likes to eat out)
not something unique about the restaurant.
3. Low consensus, high distinctiveness, low consistency: If a perceiver knows 1) few
other people like the restaurant, 2) the target person seldom likes the restaurant, and 3)
the target person disliked this restaurant in the past. More than likely the target person's
liking this restaurant is attributable to the person liking the company or wine rather than
the food.
9. Attributions and Health Education
Attribution theory can be applied to health education in 6 ways (Lewis and Daltroy, 1990):
1. development of therapeutic relationships between health care professionals and clients,
2. development of correct attributions,
3. alteration of incorrect attributions,
4. altering the focus of attributions,
5. attributing characteristics to the individual, and
6. maintenance of perceived personal effectiveness.
References
Heider, F. (1958). The Psychology of Interpersonal. Relations. New York: Wiley.
Jones, E. E. and Davis, K. E. (1965). "From Acts to Dispositions: The Attribution Process in
Person Perception." In L. Berkowitz (ed.), Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, vol. 2,
Orlando, FL: Academic Press.
Kelley, H. H. (1967). Attribution in social psychology. Nebraska Symposium on Motivation, 15,
192-238.
Kelley, H. H. (1973). The processes of causal attribution. American Psychologist, 28, 107-128.
Lewis, F. M. and Daltroy, L. H. (1990). "How Causal Explanations Influence Health Behavior:
Attribution Theory." In Glanz, K., Lewis, F.M. and Rimer, B.K. (eds.) Health Education and
Health Behavior: Theory , Research. and Practice. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass Publishers,
Inc.
Ross, M. and Fletcher, G. J. O. (1985). "Attribution and Social Perception." In G. Lindsey & E.
Aronson (eds.), The Handbook of Social Psychology, vol. 2, 73-114.
Bibliography
Boruchovitch, E. (1993, August). Causal attributions for health and illness: A cross-cultural
contribution. Paper presented at the Annual Convention of the American Psychological
Association, Toronto, Canada.
Boutsen, F. R. (1991). Single-parent college students' attributions toward academic success.
Psychology in the Schools, 28(4), 360-64.
Fiedler, K. (1995). Actor-observer bias in close relationships: The role of self-knowledge and
self-related language. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 21(5), 525-38.
Fullen, C., & Mills, B. D. (1995, July). Attribution theory in sport: Problems and solutions.
ERIC microfiche.
Kilbride, M. P. (1989). Effectiveness of inservice attribution training of teachers. Unpublished
master's thesis, University of South Florida, Tampa, FL.
Magnusson, J., & Perry, R. P. (1992). Academic help-seeking in the university setting: The
effects of motivational set, attributional style, and help source characteristics. Research in Higher
Education, 33(2), 227-45.
Wallace, S. R. & Thompson, T. E. (1995, October). Preservice teachers' changing attributions for
elementary students success of failure. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Mid-West
Educational Research Association, Chicago, IL.
Yan, W., & Gaier, E. L. (1994). Causal attributions for college success and failure: An AsianAmerican comparison. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 25(1), 146-58.
Annotated Bibliography
Baron, L. (May 1993). Narcissism, interpersonal adjustment, and coping in children of
holocaust survivors. The Journal of Psychology, 127(3), 257-270.
The article presents a study of children of holocaust survivors. The study utilizes several theories
to explain certain personality characteristics of children of holocaust survivors. The children of
the holocaust survivors completed a California Psychological Inventory, O'Brien Multiphasic
Narcissism Inventory, and the Hardiness Scale. The specific characteristics which were being
analyzed include the following: narcissism, interpersonal adjustment, and coping. The study
applies attribution theory to examine why some children of holocaust survivors might express
some of these personality characteristics.
Desprels-Frayssee, A. (September, 1993). Referential set presentation effects on
complementation by 6 year olds. Journal of Genetic Psychology, 154(3) 339-346.
The article is a study of the meaning attributed by children to the properties of objects. The study
is analyzed by the manner children respond to different complementation instructions. In this
case, complementation refers to the differentiation of several objects by a set of common
characteristics. The children of this age group in the study seem to find difficulty in
differentiating objects with more than one characteristic. Thus, the study indicates the differences
of attribution in interpretation by children.
Maltby, J. (December 1996). Attribution style and projection. Journal of Genetic
Psychology, 157(4), 505-507.
The article is a very concise argument of a study comparing attribution theory and the
psychoanalytic theory of the defense mechanism of projection. The study was performed by
administering the Attribution Style Questionnaire and the Projections sub-scale of the Defense
Style Questionnaire to a group of undergraduate students. The results of the study present no
relation between the two theories.
McClure, J. (April 1993). Discounting attributions and multiple determinants. The Journal
of General Psychology, 120(2), 99-123.
The author of this article is a well known social psychologist. He relates in this article the
discounting principle in attribution theory and the changes that have occurred with respect to this
principle. The article mentions the discrepancies among the empirical and theoretical basis of the
discounting principle. Recent research presents the new tendency of individuals to prefer
multiple explanations rather than just one for a situation. The article also includes the aspect that
in discounting, isolated causes and other associated causes exist. Then, the theories of Multiple
Causation are explained and implemented to the case. Finally, two different case studies are
presented, analyzed, and discussed.
Scott, C. (June 1997). Gender and attribution of control over health and physical size.
Journal of Social Psychology, (137) 387-389.
The article presents a study of the differences of attribution attitudes between men and women.
The study analyzed the discrepancies of genders attributing styles. The patterns of attribution by
men and women of their personal success or failure is assessed. For example, the attribution of
men and women to their success or failure in weight control. The study utilized a two-way
analysis of variance, weight being the dependent variable. The conclusion of the short article
suggests that the results of the study have implications for developing public health education
campaigns.
Witkowski, T. (April 1997). Performance level in situations of helplessness, threat, and
group affiliation: egotistic mechanisms in helplessness deficits. The Journal of Social
Psychology, 137(2), 229-235.
The article utilizes the attribution theory to explain performance deficits resulting from learned
helplessness. However, bad outcomes are usually denied responsibility, while positive outcomes
tend to be accepted in order to reinforce self-esteem. According to the article, self-esteem could
be threatened when the results are attributed to a person, and when the attribution is engaged to
the individual's self-esteem. Finally, a study is presented which aims at explaining helplessness
deficits or the lack of them by the attribution of egotism.