According to Heider, because we like to make sense of the happenings in our world, stable causes are preferable to unstable. They are more likely to be repeated which allows us to predict what is likely to occur next time. Unstable causes are, by their very nature, unpredictable. Dispositional or internal attribution is when we conclude that it is the person themselves who is wholly responsible for the behaviour, due to their abilities, intentions or efforts. That is, they have the freedom of choice in their actions. We make a situational attribution if we conclude that external influences or circumstances were behind the action and that a person’s behaviour had in some way been forced upon them. An example of this would be if two people enter a restaurant and order different meals. When the meals arrive one person tastes their food and adds salt to it. The other adds salt before tasting. In the first case one might assume that the food needed salt and would therefore, be attributing the first person’s actions to an external cause. In the case of the second person you would be more inclined to assume that they just liked salt, thus attributing their behaviour to an internal cause. (McGee & Snyder 1975)
There is a tendency to make dispositional attributions as opposed to situational ones and this has become known as the fundamental attribution error. Even though most behaviour is a product of both the person and the situation, we have a general tendency to overestimate the importance of dispositional factors and underestimate the importance of environmental or situational ones. Jones and Nisbett (1971) suggest that it is human nature to act in this way. We all want to be seen as something of a psychologist interpreting human behaviour, so we tend to make the simplest explanations fit and avoid the more complex ones.
In a study involving Hindu children and white American children, Miller (1984) found that the Hindu children made fewer dispositional and more situational attributions than the Americans. This difference increased systematically with age. At eight years old there was only a slight difference with the children, at eleven there was a more apparent difference and even more so at fifteen. Miller proposed that causal attributions do not simply depend on the individual’s personal history, but also result from socialisation in a particular culture.
There is a tendency for people to make different attributions about the same event. The individual in the situation will primarily see their own behaviour as a response to the situation (external cause), whereas an onlooker would typically attribute the individual’s behaviour to intentionality and disposition (internal cause). We are more likely to blame external causes on our own failures as this protects our self esteem. This is the self-protecting bias. When we take credit for our own successes this is the self-enhancing bias. Together they are referred to as self-serving attributional bias. (Miller and Ross 1975)
When there is evidence of there being a choice in the course of action taken by an individual or group, we need to understand what underlying disposition prompted this particular decision. Jones and Davis (1965) proposed the analysis of uncommon effects, i.e. what is distinctive (uncommon) about the effects of the choice that has been made. We can learn more about someone’s personality traits from an uncommon effect rather than a common one, but to avoid any ambiguous conclusions other elements must be considered. Choice - is the behaviour or action a result of free will? Social desirability - is the behaviour in some way different to the norm? Is it bizarre, unconventional, unusual or socially unacceptable? We are much more likely to pay attention and therefore judge behaviour that has low social desirability. Roles - when someone in a well-defined role behaves ‘out of character’. Prior expectations - the better we know someone the more capable we are of judging when their behaviour is typical or not. These are based on past experience of that particular person and we are more likely to make situational attributions.
Jones and McGillis (1976) suggested that we only gain real information from unusual behaviour which challenges our expectations. Normal behaviour goes unnoticed whereas unusual behaviour causes us to speculate on why an individual or group has acted in this way. For instance, if someone at a funeral kept making and receiving calls on his mobile phone during the service we would instantly form an unfavourable impression of what that person was like.
Kelley (1967) argued that we use covariance to judge what type of attribution we should make. Covariance is noticing when and how regularly things happen. It has three dimensions, consistency, consensus and distinctiveness. The consistency of an event is taken into account, i.e. if an individual is always late for a lecture then consistency is high. If they are usually on time then consistency is low. Consistency concerns how others act as well, so if all the students were always late for that particular lecture then there may well be something in the situation. Perhaps the timetable was incorrect or misleading. Distinctiveness is concerned with the target of the act and so it would make a difference to the attribution if an individual was only late for the lecture when it was being taken by one particular tutor.
Critics would say that Kelley overestimated people’s ability to assess covariation when in fact the procedures we use are not as logical, rational and systematic. Kelley (1972) updated his theory to cover the fact that often we only have a single occurrence of the behaviour on which to make our judgement. Kelley’s causal schemata are general ideas about ‘how certain kinds of causes interact to produce a specific kind of effect’.
Another criticism is that the covariance theory ignores people’s personal background and what is going on socially. In itself covariance does not off the full explanation for why we make the attributions we do.
The individualistic approach is gradually being replaced with the social purposes of attribution, i.e. the shared or group patterns of attribution. Researchers Bond et al (1985) obtained group attributions from undergraduates in America and Hong Kong. In asking them to produce explanations of gender-appropriate behaviour they found that the Americans tended to favour their own group compared to the students in Hong Kong. The researchers’ argument being that American culture has a strong women’s liberation movement causing the undergraduates to interpret social events in terms of gender groups. Hong Kong culture is based on co-operation and avoiding social conflict and is therefore less likely to see things in terms of ‘them and us’.
The modern European social psychology (as opposed to the American approach) believes that shared beliefs or group membership affects the individual and general, shared explanations can be adopted by large groups or even whole societies.
Attribution or interpersonal perception is the way in which the human race, either as individuals or groups, attempts to explain, predict and to some degree control the behaviour of other people. Attribution theory shows how we can rationally decide on the cause of certain behaviour yet research shows we are often biased and our views limited. Considering the rich source of ‘explanations’ and ‘justifications’ it is hardly surprising we have difficulty in attributing correctly and consistently.
