Fritz Heider is acknowledged as the father of attribution theory. Heider’s attribution theory is one of the first theories in social psychology to explain how people draw causal inferences for behavior. His basic thesis was that people attribute behavioral outcomes to dispositional (internal) causes or situational (external) causes. Heider’s attribution theory was later extended to formulate the fundamental attribution error and the correspondence bias. We will learn about them in this article.
Types of Attribution
Heider’s attribution theory believes that all human beings are naive social psychologists, curious to know the causes behind actions and behavior. Most often such causal inferences are of two types: dispositional and situational.
Dispositional Attribution
A dispositional attribution means that the outcome is attributed to internal causes. In other words, the locus of control of the behavior is thought of as internal. Therefore, the individual or the actor is held responsible for the behavior. Observers think that such an outcome occurred because of the traits, abilities, skills of the actor and not because of situational or contextual factors.
For instance, if a student gets a low score in an examination, attributing the low score to a lack of intelligence and ability is a dispositional attribution. Here we are discounting the role of all other factors like the health of the student, the difficulty of the questions and the strictness of marking. Instead, we just focused on the dispositions of the student.
Situational Attribution
A situational attribution means that the outcome is assigned to external causes. Thereby, the individual or the actor is not held responsible for the consequences of the action. Instead, we give greater importance is given to contextual and external factors.
In the above example, a situational attribution would mean attributing the low score to external factors like a difficult question paper or a strict marking pattern. We would discount dispositional factors like intelligence and effort by the student.
Fundamental Attribution Error
Although ordinary people are naive social scientists, we are susceptible to making errors in judgment. This error arises mainly because we tend to overestimate the role of dispositions in assessing other’s behavior and the role of situational factors in our own behavior. This bias in our judgment is called fundamental attribution error.
Jones and Harris, a team of social psychologists undertook a social experiment to study the fundamental attribution error. They recruited a group of students and asked them to review essays written by writers on Fidel Castro. These essays were purposefully written either in favor of Castro or against Castro. The reviewers were further divided into two groups. One group was told that the writers were forced to write in favor of or against Castro while the other group was told that they had the choice to write in favor of him or against. The results indicated the presence of fundamental attribution error. This is because the reviewers overestimated the role of dispositional factors even when they were explicitly told that the writers did not have a choice in writing in favor of or against Castro.
In daily life too, we see numerous instances in which we overestimate the role of dispositions in assessing other’s actions. At the same time, we discount dispositional factors in assessing our own behavior. Such discounting serves the purpose of shielding our self-esteem. If we were to attribute all our failures to dispositional causes, we would all have much lower self-esteem. Assigning a situational attribution helps in preserving self-confidence and also kindles hope and optimism.
Correspondence Bias
The correspondence bias refers to the tendency to explain behavior by dispositional causes even when it can be explained fully by situational causes. Like the fundamental attribution error, this too occurs mostly while drawing inferences about other people’s behavior. The role of situational and contextual factors is largely ignored.
Imagine a situation when you are in a hurry to pick up your grandmother from the station. Due to the time crunch, you skip a traffic signal or two and cut the way of a few vehicles. You would think that you drove rashly because you were in a hurry and not because you are a careless driver in general. Now imagine a situation when you have gone for a long drive with a loved one and someone else is driving the way you did in the earlier situation. You would probably not even think that the person may have an emergency. Rather you would jump to the conclusion that the driver is reckless and drives rashly in all situations.
Attribution theory is applicable in all fields of management, like marketing, economics, human resources.