Copyright © 1999 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Because humans are social animals, an individual's prospects for survival and success depend on the ability to understand, predict, and influence the behavior of other persons. Hence "people watching" is an essential human impulse. Yet it does not suffice to merely watch other people's overt actions; we strive to infer why people behave as they do. The psychological processes underlying these interpretations of the causes of behavior are studied in a subfield of social psychology known as attribution theory.
Although all proposed models of attribution assume that accurate understanding of the actual causes of behavior is a primary goal, models differ in assumptions about processing limitations that impede accuracy and about other human goals that interfere with accuracy. As in many areas of cognitive science, such as perception and DECISION MAKING, researchers often attempt to learn how the system works from where it fails, testing predictions about the errors that would arise from a process. One pattern of error is the tendency of observers to overestimate how much another's behavior is determined by the person's stable traits, a tendency first described by Ichheiser (1949) and formalized by Ross (1977) as "the fundamental attribution error" (FAE). Errors in attributing to stable dispositions (e.g., aptitudes, attitudes, and traits) have important consequences for the observer's subsequent expectancies, evaluations, and behavioral responses. For example, when a teacher attributes a student's failure to lack of intelligence (as opposed to a situational factor) this leads to reduced expectations of the student's future success, reduced liking of the student, and reduced teaching investment in the student. We will review theory and research on the FAE to illustrate how attribution theory has progressed.
The blueprint for attribution theory was Heider's (1958) GESTALT PERCEPTION analysis of interpersonal interaction. He argued that a person's response to a social situation is largely a function of how the person subjectively organizes the stimulus of a social situation, such as through attributions. Perhaps the most influential idea is that attributions are guided by lay theories such as the schema that achievement reflects both situational forces (environmental factors that facilitate or constrain the actor) and internal forces (the combination of effort and aptitude). Heider contended that the attributor, like a scientist, uses such theories in combination with his or her observations. However, the attributor errs because his or her observations are distorted by perceptual processes and, sometimes, emotional processes. For Heider, the FAE results from Gestalt perceptual processes that draw an observer's attention to the other person rather than to the situation surrounding the other person; that is, the person is "figural" against the "ground" of the situation.
A key development in research on the perceptual interpretation of the FAE was Jones and Nisbett's (1972) argument that although to an observer of action the person is figural, to the actor the situation is figural and hence self-attributions for behavior are less dispositional. The perceptual account of this actor-observer difference was supported by experiments that presented actors with the visual perspective on their behavior of an observer (by use of videotape) and found that their self-attributions became more dispositional (Storms 1973). Nevertheless, evidence also emerged for nonperceptual interpretations of why first-person explanations differ. An actor draws on different information -- information about one's mental state while acting and about one's behavior in the past (see Eisen 1979).
A shift toward emphasis on cognitive mechanisms came in the research programs constructed on the foundation of Kelley's (1967 and 1972) models. Kelley's (1967) covariation model focused on cases where an uncertain or curious observer generates an attribution "bottom up" from the data provided by multiple instances of a behavior. Attributors induce the general locus of causation for a behavior by assessing how the behavior covaries with the actor, the situation, and the temporal occasion. For example, to interpret why Sue's date John is dancing by himself, one would consider whether a consensus of people at the party are dancing alone, whether dancing alone is something that Sue's dates have often done, and whether it is something that John has often done. In tests of the model, participants generally respond to summaries of covariation data roughly as predicted, with the exception that consensus information is under-weighted (McArthur 1972). Biases in INDUCTION have been interpreted in terms of "extra" information implicitly communicated to participants (see GRICE; Hilton and Slugoski 1985; McGill 1989) or in terms of "missing" information that participants lack (Cheng and Novick 1992). Of late, research on causal induction has merged with the field of CAUSAL REASONING.
To model more typical cases of attribution where people lack time and energy to work "bottom up," Kelley (1972) proposed that people interpret a single instance of behavior "top down" from a theory. For example, an attributor who applies the Multiple Sufficient Causes (MSC) schema follows the discounting principle that if one of two alternative causes is present then the other is less likely. Tests of this model, however, found that a dispositional attribution is not fully discounted by information about the presence of a sufficient situational cause for the behavior (Snyder and Jones 1974). This manifestation of the FAE was interpreted primarily in terms of human cognitive limitations that require the use of JUDGMENT HEURISTICS, such as anchoring, when making discounting inferences about a dispositional cause (Jones 1979).
To integrate insights about different mechanisms contributing to the FAE, researchers have proposed sequential stage models: An initial perception-like process traces an actor's behavior to a corresponding disposition, then a second inference-like process adjusts the initial attribution to account for any situational factors. Whereas the first stage is posited to be automatic, much like a perceptual module, the second stage requires effort and attention and hence takes place only if these are available -- that is, if the attributor is not "cognitively busy." In support of a dual process model, experiments find that increasing participants' "busyness" results in more dispositional attributions (Gilbert, Pelham, and Krull 1988). However, it remains unclear whether the initial dispositional process is a perceptual module or merely a well-learned schematic inference.
Reacting against analyses of attribution as a decontextualized cognitive task, another recent theme is that attributions are markedly influenced by goals related to particular social contexts. The goal of assigning blame seems to accentuate the FAE (Shaver 1985). The goal of maintaining self-esteem leads people to dispositional attributions for successes but not failures (Snyder, Stephan, and Rosenfield 1976). The goal of making a good impression on an audience mitigates the FAE (Tetlock 1985). Studies of attributions in context have brought renewed attention to the important consequences of attribution, for example, the relation of dispositional attributions to sanctioning decisions (Carroll and Payne 1977). Applied research has found that self-serving styles of attribution not only protect an individual against clinical depression (Abrahamson, Seligman, and Teasdale 1978) but also contribute to achievement motivation and performance (Weiner 1985).
A current direction of attribution research involves closer attention to the knowledge structures that shape causal explanations. Explanations are constructed in order to cohere with the content knowledge triggered by observation of behavior, such as stereotypes and scripts (Read and Miller 1993). They are also constrained by frames for what constitutes an EXPLANATION in a given setting (Pennington and Hastie 1991). The guiding role of knowledge structures elucidates why the pattern of attribution errors differs across individuals, institutions, and cultures. Recent evidence points to individual differences (Dweck, Hong, and Chiu 1993) and cultural differences (Morris and Peng 1994) in the underlying causal schemas or lay theories that guide attribution. For example, findings that the FAE is stronger in Western, individualistic societies than in collectivist societies such as China seems to reflect different lay theories about the autonomy of individuals relative to social groups. Closer measurement of causal schemas and theories reveals that attribution errors previously interpreted in terms of processing limitations, such as the incomplete discounting of dispositions, reflect participants' knowledge structures rather than their inferential processes (Morris and Larrick 1995).
In sum, attribution theory has moved beyond the identification of errors like the FAE to an understanding of how they are produced by perceptual and cognitive limitations, by contextual goals, and by knowledge structures. As the story of research on the FAE phenomenon illustrates, attribution theory uncovers reciprocal relations between individual cognition, on one hand, and social and cultural contexts, on the other hand, and hence bridges the cognitive and social sciences.
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Copyright © 1999 Massachusetts Institute of Technology