Attributions
An attribution is when we try to explain someones behaviour.
It happens inside our heads and is subject to heuristics and biases as much as impressions are.
Attributions give us a sense of understanding of the world around us and reduces uncertainty. It also gives us information of how others think, facilitating communication.
Attributions in relationships
Attributions can actually be applied to interpersonal relationships and have different roles in the different stages of a relationship.
In the first stage, formation, attributions facilitate communication and reduces ambiguity. Although in the next stage of maintenance, it is less used, it plays an important role in the outcome of the final stage.
This stage is called dissolution. In this stage, two people will often find that they can’t seem to agree on which attributions to use. This is called an attributional conflict and has a high association to relationship dissatisfaction.
The attributions used on the other are also important in a relationship. Studies have found that happily married couples tend to attribute positive behaviour to the stable personality traits of their partner and negative behaviours to unstable and uncontrollable external factors.
Theories of attribution
Many theories and models about attributions have been made.
An early one was the naive psychologist model.
This model believed that humans tried to be like psychologists and would deduce the cause of some behaviour using rational observations.
This model is based on 3 principles :
Because we feel like our own behaviours are motivated, we try to look for the causes of others behaviours to find their motives.
Attributions help us find stable characteristics of the world which help us understand and predict things.
When making attributions, we distinguish between internal factors that are related to personality and the individual to external factors that are related to the environment and the situation.
Although, for the last one, we have a tendency to link things to internal factors more than external factors, even with evidence against.
This is because of the second principle. Internal factors are more stable and enduring. Thinking having found a relation between an event or behaviour and an internal factor gives us the feeling of understanding the world better.
This tendency, in addition to evidence showing we aren’t able to think very rationally, created the correspondent inference theory.
Different sources of information will be linked to internal factors to different degrees.
Freely chosen behaviour are more linked to internal factors.
Behaviour with non common effect too. These are behaviours that have specific results that can’t e produced from other behaviours. We tend to assume it to be an internal behaviour as we think the individual intended on causing the specific results.
Socially undesirable behaviour, out of role behaviours and behaviours with that affect us is usually attributed to internal factors.
There are two types of behaviours that affect us. Those with hedonic relevance, which only have direct consequences to us and high personalism behaviour which are behaviours that we think intend on harming/ benefiting us.
The covariation model was made including a little of both theories.
This model states we assign cause of behaviour to the most covarying factor, that is the factor that is consistently linked to the behaviour and the specificity to the behaviour/ situation.
These are said to be 3 factors called consistency, consensus and distinctiveness.
A high consensus behaviour is something that is done by many, while a low means it is done by only certain people.
High distinctiveness in this case means it is done only in one situation while a low means it is done in many situations.
When the consistency is low, the cause is assumed to be something else.
However, when the consistency is high, if both other factors are too, the behaviour is attributed to external factors and if both others are low, it is attributed to internal factors.
The problem is, this model also has its flaws. One being, humans aren’t very good at assessing covariations.
A notion called causal schemata which would deal with this issue was developed. This is experienced based beliefs related to how certain things interact and cause an effect.
Part 1 : Types of schemas
Part 2 : Schemas, use and relation with time
Part 3 : Biases, emotions and how we make impressions
Next Part :Attributions in different contexts and styles
Part 6 : Attribution biases
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