Chapter 3

Social psychological theories of causal inference are called attribution theories

Main idea: people need to discover the cause of their own and others’ behaviour in order to plan their
own actions

How people attribute causality

There are seven main theoretical emphases that make up the general body of attribution theory:

 1  Heider’s (1958) theory of naive psychology;

 2  Jones and Davis’s (1965) theory of correspondent inference;
 3  Kelley’s (1967) covariation model;
 4  Schachter’s (1964) theory of emotional lability;

 5  Bem’s (1967, 1972) theory of self-perception;

 6  Weiner’s (1979, 1985) attributional theory; and
 7  Deschamps’s, Hewstone’s and Jaspars’s intergroup perspective.

Heider believed that people are intuitive psychologists who construct causal theories of human
behaviour, and because such theories have the same form as scientific social psychological theories,
people are actually intuitive or naive psychologists. Naive psychologist - (or scientist)
Model of social cognition that characterises people as using rational, scientific-like, cause–effect
analyses to understand their world.

Three principles:

Because we feel that our own behaviour is motivated rather than random, we look for the
causes for other people’s behaviour in order to discover their motives.

Because we construct causal theories in order to be able to predict and control the
environment, we tend to look for stable and enduring properties of the world around us.

In attributing causality for behaviour,we distinguish between personal factors

(e.g.personality, ability) and environmental factors (e.g. situations, social pressure). The former are
examples of an internal (or dispositional) attribution and the latter of an external (or situational)
attribution. People tend to be biased in preferring internal to external attributions even in the face of
evidence for external causality. It seems that we readily attribute behaviour to stable properties of
people.

Ned Jones and Keith Davis’s theory of correspondent inference explains how people infer
that a person’s behaviour corresponds to an underlying disposition or personality trait – how we infer,
for example, that a friendly action is due to an underlying disposition to be friendly. People like to
make correspondent inferences (attribute behaviour to underlying disposition) because a dispositional
cause is a stable cause that makes people’s behaviour predictable and thus increases our own sense of
control over our world.

To make a correspondent inference, we draw on five sources of information, or cues:

 Freely chosen behaviour is more indicative of a disposition than is behaviour that is clearly
under the control of external threats, inducements or constraints.
  Behaviour with effects that are relatively exclusive to that behaviour rather than common to
many behaviours (i.e. behaviour with non-common effects) tells us more about dispositions.
People assume that others are aware of non-common effects and that the specific behaviour
was performed intentionally to produce the non-common effect - this tendency has been
called outcome bias.
 Socially desirable behaviour tells us little about a person’s disposition, because it is likely to
be controlled by societal norms. However, socially undesirable behaviour is generally
counter-normative and is thus a better basis for making a correspondent inference.

 We make more confident correspondent inferences about others’ behaviour that has important
consequences for ourselves: that is, behaviour that has hedonic relevance.
 We make more confident correspondent inferences about others’ behaviour that seems to be
directly intended to benefit or harm us: that is, behaviour that is high in personalism.

Correspondent inference cues: The act was freely chosen. The act produced a non-common effect, not
expected. The act was not considered socially desirable. The act had a direct impact on us (hedonic
relevance). The act intended to affect us (personalism).

Limitations: The theory holds that correspondent inferences depend significantly on the attribution of
intentionality, yet unintentional behaviour (e.g. careless behaviour) can be a strong basis for a
correspondent inference (e.g. that the person is a careless person). Correspondent inference theory
maintains that people assess the commonality of effects by comparing chosen and non-chosen actions,
while research shows that people simply do not attend to non-occurring behaviours and so would not
be able to compute the commonality of effects accurately.

Covariation model - Kelley’s theory of causal attribution – people assign the cause of behaviour to
the factor that covaries most closely with the behaviour (people act much like scientists). The
procedure is similar to that embodied by the statistical technique of analysis of variance (ANOVA),
and for this reason Kelley’s model is often referred to as an ANOVA model. People use this
covariation principle to decide whether to attribute behaviour to internal dispositions (e.g. personality)
or external environmental factors (e.g. social pressure).

In order to make this decision, people assess three classes of information associated with the co-
occurrence of a certain action (e.g. laughter) by a specific person (e.g. Tom) with a potential cause
(e.g. a comedian):

Consistency information – Information about the extent to which a behaviour Y always co-occurs
with a stimulus X. Does Tom always laugh at this comedian (high consistency) or only sometimes
laughs at this comedian (low consistency)?

Distinctiveness information – Information about whether a person’s reaction occurs only with one
stimulus, or is a common reaction to many stimuli. Does Tom laugh at everything (low
distinctiveness) or only at the comedian (high distinctiveness)?

Consensus information – Information about the extent to which other people react in the same way
to a stimulus X. Does everyone laugh at the comedian (high consensus) or is it only Tom who laughs
(low consensus)?

Where consistency is low, people discount the potential cause and search for an alternative. If there is
no consistent relationship between a specific cause and a specific behaviour, that cause is discounted
in favour of some other cause.
Where consistency is high, and distinctiveness and consensus are also high, one can make an external
attribution to the comedian (the cause of Tom’s laughter was the comedian); but where distinctiveness
and consensus are low, one can make an internal attribution to Tom’s personality (Tom laughed at the
comedian because Tom tends to laugh a lot).

Kelley’s attribution theory - Kelley’s covariation model states that people decide what attributions
to make after considering the (a) consistency and (b) distinctiveness of a person’s behaviour, and (c)
the degree of consensus among other observers in their reaction to the person’s behaviour.

Low consistency – discounting

High consistency, high distinctiveness, and high consensus – external attribution
High consistency, low distinctiveness and low consensus – internal attribution

General issues:

 Does not apply to the normal course of events

 People are very bad at assessing covariation
 No guarantee that people use covariation, ay attribute causality to the most salient feature or
to whatever causal agent appears to be similar to the effect
 If people do attribute causality on the basis of covariance or correlation, then they cer- tainly
are naive scientists (Hilton, 1988) – covariation is not causation.
 the covariation model is that consistency, distinctiveness and con- sensus information require
multiple observations

To deal with this, Kelley (1972b) introduced the notion of causal schemata – beliefs or
preconceptions, acquired from experience, about how certain kinds of cause interact to produce a
specific effect. One such schema is that a particular effect requires at least two causes (called the
‘multiple necessary cause’ schema): for example, someone with a drunk-driving record must have
drunk a certain amount of alcohol and have been in control of a vehicle.

Extension to attribution theory

Emotions have two distinct components: an undifferentiated state of physiological arousal, and
cognitions that label the arousal and determine which emotion is experienced. Usually the arousal and
label go hand-in-hand and our thoughts can generate the associated arousal. Sometimes, however,
there is initially unexplained arousal that could be experienced as different emotions, depending on
what kind of attributions we make for what we are experiencing.

If emotions depend on what cognitive label is assigned, through causal attribution to undifferentiated
arousal, then it might, for example, be possible to transform depression into cheerfulness simply by
reattributing arousal. A paradigm was devised to test this idea – called the misattribution paradigm.
BUT: Emotions may be significantly less labile than was originally thought, The misattribution effect
is unreliable, short-lived and largely restricted to laboratory studies.

Attributions for our own behaviour

Self-perception theory - Bem’s idea that we gain knowledge of ourselves only by making self-
attributions: for example, we infer our own attitudes from our own behaviour.

Task performance attributions

The causes and consequences of the attribution people make for how well they and others perform on
a task. In making an achievement attribution, we consider three performance dimensions:

1. 1  Locus – is the performance caused by the actor (internal) or by the situation (external)?
2. 2  Stability – is the internal or external cause a stable or unstable one?
3. 3  Controllability – to what extent is future task performance under the actor’s control?

According to Weiner, people first determine whether someone has succeeded or failed and
accordingly experienced positive or negative emotion. They then make a causal attribution for the
performance, which produces more specific emotions (e.g. pride for doing well due to ability) and
expectations that influence future performance.

Subsequently, Weiner (1995) has placed an emphasis on judgements of responsibility. On the basis of
causal attributions, people make judgements of responsibility, and these latter judgements, not the
causal attributions themselves, influence affective experience and behavioural reactions.

Attributional styles and interpersonal relationships

Attributional style - An individual (personality) predisposition to make a certain type of causal

attribution for behaviour. Research suggests that people differ in the sorts of attributions they make;
they have different attributional styles. This is because they differ in the amount of control they feel
they have over the reinforcements and punishments they receive.

Internals believe they have significant personal control over their destiny – things happen because
they make them happen. Externals are more fatalistic – they believe that they have little control over
what happens to them; things simply occur by chance, luck or the actions of powerful external agents.

Rotter devised a twenty-nine-item scale. This scale has been used to relate locus of control to a range
of behaviours, including political beliefs, achievement behaviour and reactions to illness. One
problem with the scale is that it may measure not a unitary construct (i.e. a single personality
dimension) but, rather, a number of relatively independent beliefs to do with control.

ASQ measures the sorts of explanation that people give for aversive (i.e. unpleasant) events on three
dimensions: internal/external, stable/unstable and global/specific. The global/specific dimension
refers to how wide or narrow a range of effects a cause has – ‘the economy’ is a global explanation
for someone being made redundant, whereas the closing of a specific company is a specific
explanation.

People who view aversive events as being caused by internal, stable, global factors have a ‘depressive
attributional style’ (i.e. the glass is half empty), which may promote helplessness and depression and
may have adverse health consequences.

Attributional complexity scale (ACS) measures individual differences in the complexity of the
attributions that people make for events. ASQ and the ACS provide only limited evidence of cross-
situational individual consist- ency in causal attribution.

Although more than 100 studies involving about 15,000 participants confirm an average correlation of
0.30 between attributional style and depression (Sweeney, Anderson, & Bailey, 1986), this does not
establish causation – it is a correlation where one factor explains 9 per cent of variance in the other.

Interpersonal relationships typically go through three basic phases: formation, maintenance and
dissolution.
During the formation stage, attributions reduce ambiguity and facilitate communication and an
understanding of the relationship. In the maintenance phase, the need to make attributions wanes
because stable personalities and relationships have been established. The dissolution phase is
characterised by an increase in attributions in order to regain an understanding of the relationship.

Correlational studies reveal that happily married (or non-distressed) spouses tend to credit their
partners for positive behaviour by citing internal, stable, global and controllable factors to explain
them. Negative behaviour is explained away by ascribing it to causes viewed as external, unstable,
specific and uncontrollable. Distressed couples behave in exactly the opposite way. Negative behavior
- internal, stable, global and controllable; positive - external, unstable, specific and uncontrollable.

attributions do have a causal impact on subsequent relationship satisfaction!!!

Attributional biases

Cognitive miser - A model of social cognition that characterises people as using the least complex
and demanding cognitions that are able to produce generally adaptive behaviours.

Motivated tactician - A model of social cognition that characterises people as having multiple
cognitive strategies available, which they choose among on the basis of personal goals, motives and
needs.

Correspondence bias – a tendency for people to over-attribute behaviour to stable underlying

personality dispositions

Fundamental attribution error - Bias in attributing another’s behaviour more to internal than to
situational causes. The fundamental attribution error, originally identified by Ross (1977), is a
tendency for people to make dispositional attributions for others’ behaviour, even when there are clear
external/environmental causes.

Pettigrew (1979) has suggested that the fundamental attribution error may emerge in a slightly
different form in intergroup contexts where groups are making attributions about ingroup and
outgroup behaviour – he calls this the ultimate attribution error.

Outcome bias where people assume that a person behaving in some particular way intended all the
outcomes of that behaviour

Essentialism - Pervasive tendency to consider behaviour to reflect underlying and immutable, often
innate, properties of people or the groups they belong to. Essentialism can be particularly damaging
when it causes people to attribute stereotypically negative attributes of outgroups to essential and
immutable personality attributes of members of that group.

Different explanations of the correspondence bias:

Focus of attention.The actor’s behaviour attracts more attention than the background;it is
disproportionately salient in cognition, stands out as the figure against the situational background and
is therefore overrepresented causally. Procedures designed to focus attention away from the actor and
on to the situation increase the tendency to make a situational rather than dispositional attribution. The
correspondence bias is muted or reversed when we think more about the situation.

Differential forgetting. Attribution requires the representation of causal information in memory. There
is evidence that people tend to forget situational causes more readily than dispositional causes, thus
producing a dispositional shift over time. Yet, that the direction of shift depends on the focus of
information processing and occurs immediately after the behaviour being attributed.
Linguistic facilitation. One rather interesting observation by Nisbett and Ross (1980) is that the
construction of the English language makes it relatively easy to describe an action and the actor in the
same terms, but more difficult to describe the situation in the same way.

Cultural and developmental factors

There is evidence that both developmental factors and culture may affect the correspondence bias. For
example, in Western cultures, young children explain action in concrete situational terms and learn to
make dispositional attributions only in late childhood. Hindu Indian children do not drift towards
dispositional explanations at all, but rather towards increasingly situational explanations.

The correspondence bias is a relatively ubiquitous and socially valued feature of Western cultures,
but, although present, it is less dominant in non-Western cultures. Fundamental attribution error may
be a normative way of thinking.

The fundamental attribution error is the tendency to underestimate the impact of situational factors;
and the correspondence bias is the tendency to draw correspondent dispositional inferences from
behaviour that is constrained by the situation.

The actor–observer effect

The actor–observer effect (or the self–other effect) is really an extension of the correspondence bias.
It refers to the tendency for people to attribute others’ behaviour internally to dispositional factors and
their own behaviour externally to environmental.

For example, not only do we attribute others’ behaviour more dispositionally than our own, but we
also consider their behaviour to be more stable and predictable than our own.

People make more dispositional attributions for socially desirable than socially undesirable behaviour,
irrespective of who the actor is, and actors are more dispositional in attributing positive behaviour and
more situational in attributing negative behaviour than are observers.

The actor–observer effect can be inverted if someone knows their behaviour is disposi- tionally
caused. For example, you may ‘adopt’ an injured hedgehog knowing that you are a sucker for injured
animals and you have often done this sort of thing in the past.

Finally, the actor–observer effect can be erased or reversed if the actor is encouraged to take the role
of the observer regarding the behaviour to be attributed, and the observer the role of the actor. Now
the actor becomes more dispositional and the observer more situational.

There are two main explanations for the actor–observer effect:

Perceptual focus. Almost identical to the ‘focus of attention’ expla- nation for the correspondence
bias described earlier in this chapter. For the observer, the actor and the actor’s behaviour are figural
against the background of the situation. However, actors cannot ‘see’ themselves behaving, so the
background situation assumes the role of figure against the background of self. For example,
McArthur and Post (1977) found that observers made more dispositional attributions for an actor’s
behaviour when the actor was strongly illuminated than when dimly illuminated.

Informational differences. Another reason why actors tend to make external attributions and observers
internal ones is that actors have a wealth of information to draw on about how they have behaved in
other circumstances. They may actually know that they behave differently in different contexts and
thus quite accurately consider their behaviour to be under situational control. Observers are not privy
to this autobiographical information. They see the actor behaving in a certain way in one context, or a
limited range of contexts, and have no information about how the actor behaves in other contexts.

The false consensus effect

Kelley identified consensus information as being one of the three types of information that people
used to make attributions about others’ behaviour.

People do not ignore consensus information but rather provide their own consensus information.
People see their own behaviour as typical and assume that, under similar circumstances, others would
behave in the same way.

False consensus effect - Seeing our own behaviour as being more typical than it really is.

The effect exists for a number of reasons:

● We usually seek out similar others and so should not be surprised to find that other people are
similar to us.
● Our own opinions are so salient to us, at the forefront of our consciousness, that they eclipse the
possibility of alternative opinions.
● We are motivated to ground our opinions and actions in perceived consensus in order to validate
them and build a stable world for ourselves.

The false consensus effect is stronger for important beliefs and for beliefs about which we are very
certain. In addition, external threat, positive qualities, the perceived similarity of others and minority
group status also inflate perceptions of consensus.

Self-serving biases

Attribution is influenced by our desire for a favourable image of ourselves. We make attributions that
satisfy self-serving biases. Overall, we take credit for our positive behaviours and successes as
reflecting who we are and our intention and effort to do positive things (the self-enhancing bias). At
the same time, we explain away our negative behaviours and failures as being due to coercion,
normative constraints and other external situational factors that do not reflect who we ‘really’ are (the
self-protecting bias). This is a robust effect that holds across many cultures. Self-serving biases are
clearly ego-serving.

There is also a cognitive component, particularly for the self-enhancing aspect. People generally
expect to succeed and therefore accept responsibility for success. If they try hard to succeed, they
associate success with their own effort, and they generally exaggerate the amount of control they have
over successful performances. Together, these cognitive factors might encourage internal attribution
of success. Overall, it is most likely both cognitive and motivational factors have a role and they are
difficult to disentangle from one another.

Self-enhancing biases are more common than self-protecting biases – partly because people with low
self-esteem tend not to protect themselves by attributing their failures externally; rather, they attribute
them internally.

One self-serving bias which most of us have exploited from time to time is self-handicapping, a term
described by Jones and Berglas:
The self-handicapper, we are suggesting, reaches out for impediments, exaggerates handicaps,
embraces any factor reducing personal responsibility for mediocrity and enhancing personal
responsibility for success.

People self-handicap in this way when they anticipate failure, whether in their job performance, in
sport, or even in therapeutic settings when being ‘sick’ allows one to drop out of life. What a person
often will do is intentionally and publicly make external attributions for a poor showing even before it
happens.

Another instance of self-serving attribution surfaces when attribution of responsibility is influenced

by an outcome bias. People tend to attribute greater responsibility to someone who is involved in an
accident with large rather than small consequences. For example, we would attribute greater
responsibility to the captain of a super-tanker that spills millions of litres of oil than to the captain of a
charming little fishing boat that spills only a few litres, although the degree of responsibility may
actually be the same.

This effect quite probably reflects the tendency for people to cling to an illusion of control by
believing in a just world. People like to believe that bad things happen to ‘bad people’ and good
things to ‘good people’ (i.e. people get what they deserve), and that people have control over and
responsibility for their outcomes. This attributional pattern makes the world seem a controllable and
secure place in which we can determine our own destiny.

Belief in a just world can result in a pattern of attribution where victims are deemed responsible for
their misfortune – poverty, oppression, tragedy and injustice all happen because victims deserve it.
Examples of the just world hypothesis in action are such views as the unemployed are responsible for
being out of work, and rape victims are responsible for the violence against them.

Belief in a just world may also be responsible for self-blame. Victims of traumatic events such as
incest, debilitating illness, rape and other forms of violence can experience a strong sense that the
world is no longer stable, meaningful, controllable or just. One way to reinstate an illusion of control
is, ironically, to take some responsibility for the event