Elaborate upon the theory of attribution, its relevance and implications.

Attribution theory is concerned with how ordinary people explain the causes of behavior and events. For example, is someone angry because they are bad-tempered or because something bad happened?

A formal definition is provided by Fiske and Taylor (1991, p. 23):

“Attribution theory deals with how the social perceiver uses information to arrive at causal explanations for events. It examines what information is gathered and how it is combined to form a causal judgment”.

Heider (1958) believed that people are naive psychologists trying to make sense of the social world. People tend to see cause and effect relationships, even where there is none!

Heider didn’t so much develop a theory himself as emphasize certain themes that others took up. There were two main ideas that he put forward that became influential: dispositional (internal cause) vs situational (external cause) attributions.

Dispositional vs Situational Attribution

1.Dispositional attribution

assigns the cause of behavior to some internal characteristic of a person, rather than to outside forces.

When we explain the behavior of others we look for enduring internal attributions, such as personality traits. This is known as the fundamental attribution error.

For example, we attribute the behavior of a person to their personality, motives or beliefs.

Situational Attribution

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