What Is Attribution Theory?

Attribution theory. In daily social communication, in order to effectively control and adapt to the environment, people often make a conscious or unconscious explanation of various social behaviors that occur in the surrounding environment, that is, the cognitive whole. In the cognitive process, other unknown characteristics are inferred according to certain specific personality characteristics or certain behavior characteristics of others in order to seek causal relationships between various characteristics. ^[1]

In 1958, Fritz Heider put forward the theory of attribution from the perspective of Naive psychology in his book "Interpersonal Psychology". This theory mainly solves how people find out events in daily life. s reason. Hyde believes that people have two strong motivations: one is the need to form a consistent understanding of the surrounding environment; the other is the need to control the environment. In order to meet these two needs, ordinary people must attribute the actions of others and predict the actions of others through attribution. Only in this way can the need to "understand the environment and control the environment" be met. Therefore, ordinary people, like psychologists, try to explain behaviors and discover causality, but ordinary people do not have any scientific method for attribution. They rely more on understanding and introspection. This kind of attribution activity of ordinary people is called naive psychology by Hyde, and accordingly, Hyde is also called naive psychologist. ^[2]

In 1972, B. Weiner proposed his own attribution theory on the basis of Hyde's attribution theory and JWAtkinson's achievement motivation theory. Wiener basically agrees that the causes of actions are divided into internal causes and external causes. He also proposes a new dimension, which is to divide the causes into temporary and stable ones. ^[2]

The three-degree attribution theory proposed by H. Kelly, also known as the multi-thread analysis theory, or covariance attribution theory, was proposed by Kelly on the basis of absorbing Hyde's covariation principle. He believes that attribution is mostly under uncertainty. People accumulate information from a variety of events and use the "co-variation principle" to solve the problem of uncertainty. Kelly believes that when trying to explain someone's behavior, there are three forms of attribution that can be used: attribution to the actor, to objective stimuli (events or others to which the actor responds), and attribution. Due to the situation or relationship of the actor. ^[2]

This theory was proposed by Jones and Davis in 1965. It claims that when people attribute personally, the intention and

American psychologist Bernard Weiner (1974) believes that the analysis of the reasons for the success or failure of behavior can be summarized into the following six reasons:

Ability to assess whether an individual is competent for the job based on his or her own ability ;

Efforts , personal reflection on whether they have done their best in the work process;

Difficulty of the task. Determine the difficulty of the task based on personal experience;

Luck , personally think whether the success or failure of this time is related to luck;

Physical and mental state , whether the individual's current physical and mood conditions during the work process affect the work effectiveness;

Other factors , personally conscious of the success or failure of this time, in addition to the above five, there are other factors affecting people and things (such as help from others or unfair scores, etc.)

The above six factors are taken as the explanation or category of the attribution of success or failure by ordinary people. Weiner is divided into the following three dimensions according to the nature of each factor:

1. Control point (factor source) : refers to the source of the factors that the parties consider to influence their success or failure, whether based on personal conditions (internal control) or from the external environment (external control). In this regard, three items of ability, effort, and physical and mental status belong to internal control, and the other items belong to external control.

2. Stability : refers to the factors that the parties consider to affect their success or failure, whether they are stable in nature and whether they are consistent in similar situations. In this aspect, the six factors of the ability and the difficulty of work are relatively stable without changing with the situation. Everything else is unstable.

3. Controllability : Refers to the factors that the parties consider to influence their success or failure, and whether their nature can be determined by individual wishes. In this aspect, only one of the six factors can be controlled by personal will, and the other are beyond the power of the individual.

Weiner et al. Believe that our interpretation of success and failure will have a significant impact on future behavior. If the failure of the test is attributed to lack of ability, future tests will still be expected to fail; if the failure of the test is attributed to bad luck, it is unlikely that future tests will fail. These two different attributions can have a significant impact on life.

Main points of Weiner's attribution theory :

1. A person's personality differences and success or failure experience affect his attribution.

2. The attribution of a person's previous achievement will affect his expectations, emotions, and effort level for the next achievement.

3. Personal expectations, emotions, and effort have a great influence on achievement behavior.

Weiner starts from the individual's attribution process, and explores the relationship between the individual's attribution of success and failure and the achievement behavior, the identifiable cause characteristics that influence the behavior result, the structure of the cause, the relationship between the cause attribution and emotion, and the motivation of emotional response Roles, etc. all provide creative insights. He believes that everyone strives to explain their behavior and analyze the reasons for their behavioral results. Whether it is success or failure, when a person analyzes its root causes, there are mainly three dimensions and six factors. The combination of three dimensions and six factors is shown in the following table:

	stability		Internal / external		Controllability
	stable	Unstable	Inner	external	Controllable	Can not control
Ability level	+		+			+
Effort level		+	+		+
Task difficulty	+			+		+
Good luck		+		+		+
Physical and mental condition		+	+			+
external environment		+		+		+

to sum up

These attribution theories are all inherited from Hyde's "naive psychologist" tradition, treating people as rational, and conducting causal analysis on attribution. In fact, people do not always act rationally in attribution. D. Carneman and A. Twisky (1973) specifically point this out. They do not see people as "simple psychologists", but as cognitive economists. They pay attention to saving energy in attribution and come to a conclusion on the way. Carneman and Twisky proposed that in daily life people often use two heuristics to make inferences: one is representative heuristics, and the other is availability heuristics. The former means that people often choose representative cases when making inferences. For example, a family in a place has 6 children, most of whom are 3 men and 3 women. Ask you about the birth order of 3 men and 3 women, which is most likely to be men and women and women and men and women. Generally tend to think of the latter. In fact, the two sequences have the same possibility. Because there are 20 possible birth orders for 3 men and 3 women, of which only two are similar to the former, and the remaining 18 are mixed, and the mixed type is representative. Availability heuristics mean that easily accessible information is often used. If you ask which classmate in your class has the most influence, the first thing you think of is that person is often considered to have the most influence. Availability heuristics can explain the difference between observers and actors in attribution. For actors, context is outstanding, for observers, actors are outstanding. What stands out is easy to remember and easy to recall. This example also illustrates the prominent influence on attribution, which highlights the observer's preference for personal attribution and the actor's preference for situational attribution.