An Introduction to Attribution Processes

Kelly G. Shaver

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781315535999
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Psychologie sociale

Why do people act the way they do? How do their desires and fears become known to us? When are our opinions of others correct, and when are they likely to be mistaken? These are questions which attribution theory tries to answer. Originally published in 1975, this title provides an informal introduction to the field of attribution, with the theoretical principles and issues illustrated in everyday examples. The origins of current attribution theory are outlined, and models of the inference process are examined. The intellectual debt owed to social psychology by the attribution theory is acknowledged, and an exploration of the interpersonal and social consequences of attribution is included.

1
Introduction

How are people's actions to be interpreted and understood? What are the underlying regularities in another's personality? How does the social environment affect even the perception of one's own behavior? The purpose of this book is to introduce you to an area of social psychology—attribution—that describes the processes by which these inferences may be made. Much of the social behavior of individuals, groups, and even nations is affected by the capabilities and desires that are attributed to friends and adversaries alike. Indeed, friendship itself is something that we infer from the behavior of other people: if a person says pleasant words to you, offers to help you with tasks that you must perform, provides support for you when you are feeling low, is happy when you are, then you will most probably consider that person a friend. You have evaluated the person's behavior as positive toward you, determined that he has nothing of great value to gain by currying your favor, and may have observed that he does not behave in the same way with just everybody. In other words, you have made an attribution to the person of friendliness toward you as a social object.

The pages that follow will describe the basic processes involved in the attribution of such underlying dispositions, will present some of the situational factors and personal motives that may influence attribution, and will show some of the interpersonal consequences of our attempts to understand the meaning of human action. We begin with two examples which illustrate important principles of attribution and suggest why they might be worth study.

Perceivers, Attributions, and Dispositions

The Cuban missile crisis of 1962 is an excellent example, on a national level, of the importance of attributed intentions and motives. In a televised address to the nation, President John F. Kennedy confirmed rumors that Russia had begun to install intermediate-range ballistic missiles into shielded bunkers in Cuba. Throughout the succeeding weeks, the Soviet Union maintained that the missiles were for purely defensive purposes and were being installed at the request of the newly established Cuban government of Fidel Castro. For a number of reasons, however, the prevailing view in this country was that the missiles (which had sufficient range to reach most of North and South America) would be used for "nuclear blackmail" of pro-United States governments in Central and South America. At that time most Americans considered their country to be moral and peace-loving,* and since there was little general knowledge of the intent behind the CIA-directed invasion of Cuba (the ill-fated Bay of Pigs operation), the assertion that these missiles were only for defensive purposes had little influence on American public opinion. Moreover, those were the cold war days, before the Sino-Soviet split, when most Americans perceived Communism to be a monolithic, expansionist movement—a view reinforced by actions such as Russia's crushing the rebellion of the Hungarian freedom fighters six years earlier. Finally, the new president was a liberal Democrat whom some considered to be less concerned about containing the spread of Communism than was his Republican predecessor. As a result of these and other factors, the presence of the missiles was generally thought to represent a direct threat to the security of the United States. In the language of attribution theory, the action (installing the missiles) was attributed to an underlying disposition (belligerence toward the United States). Thus, the action was considered to be not an isolated instance of behavior with no implications for the future, but rather a manifestation of a stable disposition that would probably give rise to other threatening actions in the future.

This example shows that persons are seldom content to be passive observers of behavior. Rather they are active perceivers of action, engaged in a search for the regularities underlying the behavior they observe, and their very activity will have consequences for the attributions that they will make. To no small degree the disposition inferred from an action is in the eye of the perceiver: while nations friendly to the United States joined in expressing their indignation, nations friendly to the Soviet Union publicly wondered what all the fuss was about. Not only can a perceiver's viewpoint help shape the nature of a disposition inferred from behavior, it can affect the relative importance assigned to that disposition. The United States and other countries within range of the missiles were certainly more upset by the imputed belligerence than were those of their allies who were out of range.

The persistent search for the meaning of behavior, and the effects of the active involvement of the perceiver, can also be seen in situations much less extreme than the national crisis of our first example. Consider for a moment the task facing a jury in the criminal trial of a person accused of assault. Testimony has established that the defendant was arguing with a shopkeeper over the price of an article that was supposed to be on sale. As the argument became more heated, the shopkeeper attempted to usher the defendant out of the store. Witnesses for both the prosecution and the defense agreed that the defendant refused to move and that the two suddenly came to blows. There was, however, some disagreement about the degree of provocation, and no one could remember with absolute certainty whether the defendant had thrown the first punches. Lengthy cross-examination by both sides has failed to discredit any key witnesses, so the jury is faced with resolving the discrepancy. Again, in the language of attribution, the jury must make an attribution of causality, either to a dispositional quality of the actor (a personal disposition) or to a factor in the environment such as provocation by the shopkeeper (an environmental disposition). It should be emphasized that throughout this book the meaning of the term personal disposition will be restricted to cases of attribution to the particular actor in question, while the term environmental disposition will be used to describe any attribution to factors other than the actor (including, as in the present example, possible provocations from other persons).

It is clear that the defendant's fate depends on the attribution that is made, with a personal attribution leading to a guilty verdict and an environmental attribution (such as justifiable self-defense) leading to acquittal. It is less apparent though equally true that, as in the missile crisis example, the personal characteristics of perceivers (here, the jury) can affect the resulting attribution. To help illustrate the point, evaluate this case for yourself. Without looking back, can you guess the sex and race of the defendant? You probably guessed that the defendant was male and perhaps black. In the absence of any information, this guess is most apt to be correct, since the modal defendant in an assault case is a black male. This perfectly rational guess becomes a personal bias when it serves as an estimate not of the characteristics of the average defendant, but of the guilt or innocence of an individual. Suppose you were informed that the defendant was actually a white, upper-middle-class woman. With all other things equal, would you consider her more likely or less likely to be guilty than a lower-class black male? If yours is a typical response, you would judge the female less likely to be guilty than the male. Rokeach and Vidmar (1973) report data that suggest possible bias against defendants who are lower-class rather than middle- or upper-class, and who are black rather than white. Other research by Landy and Aronson (1969) raises the distinct possibility that there would be bias in favor of a female defendant, especially with a predominantly male jury. Thus, even in situations which emphasize objectivity in interpersonal evaluation, perceivers bring with them attitudes and values that can affect their decisions. The influence of these factors can only be greater on the everyday attributions we make under less well defined and objective circumstances.

The Goals of Attribution: Understanding and Prediction

Both the missile crisis and the jury deliberation examples illustrate a fundamental assumption of attribution theory: perceivers will try to identify the causes of the behavior they observe. Why should this be the case? What can perceivers gain from a dispositional attribution (either to a person or to the environment) that is not inherent in their observation of the action? First, the perceivers can increase their understanding of the behavior. We are not satisfied with mere observation of actions, in part because there are just too many such actions for us to keep track of them all. There is a limit to the amount of perceptual information that a human being can comprehend, and through various devices such as selective attention, categorization of stimuli, and attribution of dispositions, perceivers will simplify their worlds to manageable proportions. In this regard, a dispositional attribution provides the common denominator for a variety of actions and serves to organize them into a meaningful pattern. Thus it was not important to American citizens whether the missiles had been moved into Cuba by cargo ship or by barge, during weekdays or on weekends, when the moon was full or when it was new, but simply that they were there and that their presence was viewed as a potentially hostile action. As is the case with other kinds of cognitive categorization, a dispositional attribution may disregard some crucial information (and thereby be incorrect) while permitting the perceivers to attend to those aspects of the situation that appear important to them.

If the first goal of attribution is to increase the perceivers' understanding of the social world around them, the second objective of dispositional attribution is to increase the perceivers' ability to predict what the actor is likely to do in the future. If the action taken in either of our examples were thought to be accidental (Russia really intended those missiles to be sent to Albania; the defendant was really just trying to catch himself after slipping on a banana peel), there would be no way for a perceiver to estimate the likelihood that the action would recur in the future. With a dispositional attribution to the environment (threat to the security of Cuba by the United States or provocation by the shopkeeper), the perceiver would begin to expect a similar response to the same conditions in the future. Repetition of the action would then appear to be contingent on future circumstances. Attribution of the action to a personal disposition of the actor, however, would imply that future similar actions might be taken regardless of the circumstances. Here again, because the meaning seen by the perceiver in the action can be incorrect, the prediction based on a dispositional attribution can be faulty. Changes in the environment could overpower the effect of the disposition—the world balance of power could change so that Russia and the United States could find themselves to be allies—or the fact of the attribution could be mistaken. Despite these possibilities for error, it is still probably true that dispositional attribution increases the perceiver's ability to predict future behavior of the actor beyond what would be possible from observation without attribution. The place of these two goals—understanding and prediction—in the attribution process will be more fully discussed in Chapter 3.

The Nature of the Attribution Process: Plan of the Book

Whether the situation makes explicit the problem-solving nature of attribution, as in the case of jury deliberation, or whether the process appears immediate, it nevertheless remains a process to which the perceiver has contributed. By virtue of his active participation in his search for the causes and meaning of behavior of others, the perceiver can make (often unconsciously) significant errors in attribution. The remainder of the book outlines the origins of current attribution theory, examines models of the inference process, and suggests some of the interpersonal consequences that can follow the attributions we make.

Although a person's attributions are an important influence on his behavior, they are not his only interpersonal judgments. From a broader perspective, the approach and method of attribution theory owe an intellectual debt to the general area of social psychology known as person perception. Chapter 2 acknowledges this debt with an outline of traditional elements of person perception. It illustrates differences between the perception of inanimate objects and the perception of persons, showing how the latter is complicated by the thinking and acting of the stimulus person. Students who already have a solid background in person perception should go directly to Chapter 3, which traces the development of an identifiable body of attribution theory from two earlier research traditions—interest in the characteristics of persons who seem to be highly accurate judges of others, and interest in the influence of bodily needs and personality dynamics on perception. To provide an orientation to the models of attribution that follow, Chapter 3 will conclude with an analysis of the essential stages of the attribution process.

Chapter 4 will begin with the pioneering work of Fritz Heider (1958), then consider the extensions of that theory proposed by Jones and Davis (1965) and Kelley (1967, 1971). The strengths and weaknesses of each of these models of the attribution process will be discussed in Chapter 5, which will show how each model deals with the elements of the attribution process—observation, intention, dispositional attribution. This is a difficult chapter, primarily of value to highly interested students. Since its content is not carried over into the remainder of the book, introductory students may omit the chapter without any loss of continuity.

The next three chapters will consider dispositional attributions to specified individual actors. Chapter 6 will describe attributions that perceivers make for their own behavior, and will discuss the possible reasons for the discrepancies that are often obtained between the descriptions of actors and observers. Chapter 7 will identify the personal and situational determinants of judgments of personal causality and responsibility. Of all the dispositional attributions that a perceiver may make, the attribution of causality to another person is perhaps the most important, if only because other inferences to be made about the stimulus person depend on the belief that his behavior was intended. Following this discussion of the attribution of causality, Chapter 8 will describe the ways in which personality dispositions are inferred from the actor's behavior and the context in which that behavior is performed.

Finally, Chapter 9 will consider how the attributions that a perceiver makes can influence his subsequent behavior toward the stimulus person. Research will be discussed that suggests how a person's behavior toward himself can be altered by changes in attributions made during psychotherapy, and how his actions toward other individuals or groups can depend on his attributions of the causes for their behavior. Of particular interest are the possible consequences of differences between personal and environmental attributions for phenomena as diverse as changes in self-concept, commitment to mental institutions, and domestic social welfare policies.

*For a more recent examination of the consequences of this self-image, see White, 1970.

2
The Foundation of Attribution: Person Perception

We have seen that perceivers are active participants in the perceptual process: they try to explain and predict human behavior through processes described by attribution theory. At this point you may wonder just where attribution fits in the larger context of social psychology. Is it found in phenomena of socialization? Attitude change? Group dynamics? A case can be made for the importance of attribution in all of these areas, but historically attribution theory is most closely identified with social perception. The basic data for any attribution are, after all, the actions of persons, so in both approach and method, attribution theory has developed out of the area of social psychology known as person perception. You will probably find it easier to understand attribution theory if you are familiar with some of the traditional concerns of person perception, such as models of the process, descriptions of the stimulus, and actions of the person that contribute to the perceiver's impression. Accordingly, this chapter summarizes major elements of person perception. Comprehensive review is beyond the scope of this book; advanced students are referred to detailed discussions by Taguiri and Petrullo (1958) and later by Taguiri (1969).

Social Perception as a Lens of the World

Whether the stimulus for perception is an inanimate object or another person, the result of the perceptual process can be defined, following Allport (1955), as "a phenomenological experience of the object, that is to say, the way some object or situation appears to the subject . . ."(p. 23). It is assumed by this definition that an objective reality which contains both things and people exists outside the perceiver. To indicate that these physical and social objects are remote from the perceiver and cannot be directly experienced by him, they are referred to as distal objects. After some appropriate kind of mediation—light waves, sound waves, physical contact—a distal object will become represented at the perceiver's peripheral sense organs. The light waves produce an identifiable pattern on the rods and cones in the retina of the eye, the sound waves stimulate a particular pattern of response by various elements of the inner ear, and the physical contact gives rise to a pattern of response from receptors in the skin that are sensitive to pressure and temperature. In each case, the resulting pattern of stimulation of receptors is called the proximal stimulus and is the local and immediate representation of the distal object out in the world. It is generally agreed (see Allport, 1955) that the proximal stimulus is less than perfect as a representation of the distal object; some information is almost necessarily lost, either through selective attention on the part of the perceiver, or through what has been called a limitation in "channel capacity." This refers to the fact that only so much information can be accepted by the sense organs at a particular moment in time, and a complex stimulus can easily overwhelm the capacity of those or...