Attributions are the cognitive and communicative processes involved in making sense of why someone acted the way he or she did. This sense-making usually revolves around attempts to determine the cause (i.e., why) and/or who is responsible for an action. Studied initially as a largely internal, psychological process (e.g., Heider 1958), researchers in communication often
Attributions are explanations about why particular performances or behaviors have occurred. When faced with important, negative, novel, or unexpected events, individuals search for meaningful explanations for the causes of those events. In this regard, it is widely acknowledged that attributions are an area of importance in the field of applied psychology because of their implications
Responsibility Attribution Definition A responsibility attribution relates to beliefs about the cause of an event, or outcome, or state. The event in question may be positive (success) or negative, but responsibility is used more in association with aversive outcomes. Hence, a responsibility attribution is linked with terms such as fault and blame, with the individual
Defensive Attribution Definition Defensive attributions are explanations of behaviors that serve to defend an individual’s preferred beliefs about self, others, and the world. Defensive Attribution Background Sigmund Freud, at the beginning of the 20th century, first popularized the idea that people’s desires can bias their explanations of events. Freud proposed a variety of defense mechanisms
Discounting in Attribution Definition Attribution is the way in which people explain the causes of events or behaviors. At times, individuals must choose among different possible causes as explanations for a particular event or behavior. When people can see more than one reason for something happening, they discount, or minimize, the importance of each reason
Distinctiveness, in attribution, refers to the extent to which a specific action engaged in by an individual is unusual or uncommon for that particular individual. The judgment of whether an action is high in distinctiveness, that is, uncommon for the individual who engaged in it, or low in distinctiveness, common for that individual, depends on
Fundamental Attribution Error Definition The fundamental attribution error describes perceivers’ tendency to underestimate the impact of situational factors on human behavior and to overestimate the impact of dispositional factors. For instance, people often tend to believe that aggressive behavior is caused by aggressive personality characteristics (dispositional factor) even though aggressive behavior can also be provoked
Hostile Attribution Bias Definition The hostile attribution bias (HAB) is the tendency to interpret the behavior of others, across situations, as threatening, aggressive, or both. People who exhibit the HAB think that ambiguous behavior of others is hostile and often directed toward them, while those who do not exhibit the HAB interpret the behavior in
Attribution Definition The term attribution has several distinct meanings. In the 1920s, Austrian philosopher and psychologist Fritz Heider originally referred to attribution as a central process in human perception that helped solve a philosophical puzzle of the time. According to this puzzle, the mind perceives objects that exist in the world, but the perception itself
Attribution theory is a prominent and widely researched theory of motivation that was developed by Bernard Weiner and colleagues from the University of California, Los Angeles, in the 1970s and 1980s. The focal point of attribution theory is the general human tendency to ask “why” an outcome occurred, especially outcomes that are negative, unusual, or
Attribution Theory Definition Attribution theory—or rather, a family of attribution theories—is concerned with the question of how ordinary people explain human behavior. One type of attribution theory emphasizes people’s use of folk psychology to detect and understand internal states such as goals, desires, or intentions. People then use these inferred states to explain the behavior