Attribution Theory

What is attribution theory?

Attribution theory concerns how people explain the causes of events and behavior. Explanations may refer to a person, circumstances or combinations of causes.

How attribution theory developed

Fritz Heider’s 1958 book, The Psychology of Interpersonal Relations, helped establish this field. Later accounts examine different parts of how people infer causes.

Kelley (1973) examines how people combine information and prior expectations when making causal explanations. Attribution theory is a family of accounts, not simply a list of judgment errors.

Internal and external attributions

• An internal, or dispositional, attribution points to a person’s characteristics, such as ability.
• An external, or situational, attribution points to circumstances, such as task difficulty.

A person’s performance can reflect both.

For example, if someone arrives late to a meeting, disorganization is one possible explanation; heavy traffic is another. Attribution theory concerns how a person chooses between explanations, not a rule that one of these answers must be correct.

Attribution theory and attribution bias

Specific attribution biases also need to be tested. For example, a meta-analysis by Malle (2006) found little average support for the classic claim that people explain their own behavior situationally and others' behavior dispositionally. Patterns varied with event valence and study conditions.

Attribution theory in the workplace

A manager trying to explain poor performance might consider skill, motivation, training, or an unrealistic deadline. The useful question is how well each explanation fits the evidence. Mentioning personality does not make an explanation wrong; mentioning context does not make it right.

For named patterns of distorted explanation, see attribution bias.