Attribution (Psychology)

Attribution is a concept in social psychology which refers as to how the individuals give details for the causes of events, other's behaviour, and their own behaviour.

The argument given by Fritz Heider was that, “as an active perceiver of the events, the average person continuously or spontaneously makes causal inferences on why the events occur.” Ultimately, these inferences become the way of life or the prospect that allows the human being to foretell and understand the proceedings that they monitor and experience. At the same time, the attribution theory is apprehensive with how the individuals understand the events and how these interpretations communicate with their succeeding behaviour.

The 2 main types of attributions are:

• Internal attribution: The cause of the behaviour is assigned to the individual’s personality, attitudes, personality, or temperament etc.
• External attribution: The cause of the given behaviour is assigned to the circumstances in which the behaviour was seen (i.e. the behaviour produced by the individual was done because of the surrounding environment or the social situation).

These two types of attribution leads to different perceptions of the individual engaging in a behaviour (Personal is Internal and Situational is external).

Some of the attribution theories are:

• People as intuitive psychologists: Even though all the behaviour fallout from both external and internal forces or processes, we however have a tendency to give explanation as the behaviour that is caused is more by either internal or external factors.
• Correspondent inference theory: People attempt to make 'correspondent inferences' about others.
• Covariation theory: Covariation theory assumes that people make causal attributions in a balanced, reasonable fashion, and that they give the cause of an action to the factor that covaries most closely with that action.
• Abnormal conditions focus model: This model argues that to be attributed as a cause, something must be judged to be unusual or infrequent.
• Motivational attribution theory: 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 behaviour.

According the Weiner the three categories in achievement attributions are:

• stability
• locus of causality
• control.

Questions:

• What is correspondent inference theory according to Jones and Davis?
• What is meant by covariation model?