Causal attribution: what is it in psychology, examples, theory and mechanism, effects, types, fundamental errors

Even (or precisely for this reason) such a complex device as the human psyche “jumps”—it is subject to cognitive distortions. Some of them are obvious, so it’s easy to fight them; it’s enough to be aware of them. But others are confusing and you can’t figure them out quickly. One of these complex phenomena is causal attribution, a phenomenon of human perception.

Gestalt psychologist Fritz Heider is considered the “father” of causal attribution, which he wrote about back in the 1920s. In his dissertation, Haider addresses the problem of information perception and how a person interprets it. After him, many scientists began to study the phenomenon in more detail. We will talk about their theories later, but first we will deal with the concept itself.

Types of causal attribution

Wikipedia defines the term as follows: causal attribution (from Latin causa - cause, Latin attributio - attribution) - a phenomenon of interpersonal perception. It consists of interpreting, attributing reasons for another person’s actions in conditions of a lack of information about the actual reasons for his actions.

Trying to find the reasons for other people's behavior, people often fall into the traps of prejudice and error. As Fritz Heider said: “Our perception of causality is often distorted by our needs and certain cognitive distortions.”

Here are examples of cognitive distortions due to causal attribution.

Fundamental attribution error

The fundamental attribution error is the explanation of other people’s actions by internal factors (“this person is a bore” – internal disposition), and one’s own actions by external circumstances (“events unfolded in such a way that I could not have done anything differently” – external disposition). It becomes most obvious when people explain and assume the behavior of others.

Reasons for fundamental attribution:

Unequal opportunities: ignoring the characteristics determined by the role position.
False agreement: viewing one's behavior as typical and behavior that differs from it as abnormal.
More trust in facts than in judgments.
Ignoring the informational value of what did not happen: what was not done should also be the basis for evaluating behavior.

Example one: your friend failed the exam that you both took. He always seemed to have a low level of knowledge. You begin to think that he is lazy, doing everything but studying. However, it is possible that he has problems remembering information or some difficult circumstances in the family that interfere with preparing for exams.

Example two: a stranger’s car won’t start. You decide to help him by giving him some practical advice. He disagrees with them or simply ignores them. You become angry and begin to perceive this person as rude and rejecting sincere help. However, he's probably been given the same advice before and it didn't work. After all, he just knows his car better. Or he was having a bad day.

Note that we are talking about internal disposition. If we talk about external ones, then if you do not pass the exam, then, most likely, you will explain this not by the low level of your knowledge, but by bad luck - you got the most difficult ticket. And if your car doesn’t start, then the person who is trying to help/being smart, even though he wasn’t asked, will be to blame.

External disposition is not necessarily bad. This is to some extent a defense mechanism because you don’t feel guilty, don’t spoil your mood and look at the world optimistically. But it can also lead to a constant search for excuses and personality degradation.

Cultural prejudice

It occurs when someone makes assumptions about a person's behavior based on their cultural practices, background, and beliefs. For example, people from Western countries are considered to be individualists, while Asians are collectivists. Well, you’ve probably heard more than one joke about Jews, Armenian radio and representatives of many other nationalities.

Difference between participant and observer

As already noted, we tend to attribute the behavior of other people to our dispositional factors, classifying our own actions as situational. Therefore, attribution may vary from person to person depending on their role as a participant or observer - if we are the main actor, we tend to view the situation differently than when we are simply observing from the outside.

Dispositional (characteristic) attribution

It is the tendency to attribute people's behavior to their dispositions, that is, to their personality, character, and abilities. For example, when a waiter treats his customer rudely, the customer may assume that he has a bad character. There is an instant reaction: “The waiter is a bad person.”

Thus, the customer succumbed to dispositional attribution, attributing the waiter's behavior directly to his personality, without considering the situational factors that could cause this rudeness.

Self-serving attribution

When a person receives a promotion, he believes that it is due to his abilities, skills and competence. And if he doesn’t get it, then he thinks that the boss doesn’t like him (an external, uncontrollable factor).

Initially, researchers thought that the person wanted to protect their self-esteem in this way. However, later it was believed that when results meet expectations, people tend to attribute this to internal factors.

Defensive attribution hypothesis

The defensive attribution hypothesis is a social psychological term that refers to a set of beliefs that a person holds in order to protect themselves from anxiety. To put it simply: “I am not the cause of my failure.”

Defensive attributions can also be made towards other people. Let's put it in the phrase: "Good things happen to good people, and bad things happen to bad people." We believe this so we don't feel vulnerable in situations where we have no control over them.

In this case, everything goes to the extreme. When a person hears that someone was killed in a car accident, he may assume that the driver was drunk or bought a license, but this will certainly never happen to him personally.

All of the above examples of causal attribution are very similar to cognitive dissonance - a state of mental discomfort in a person caused by a clash in his mind of conflicting ideas: beliefs, ideas, emotional reactions and values. This theory was proposed by Leon Festinger. He formulates two hypotheses for this phenomenon:

When a person experiences dissonance, he strives with all his might to reduce the degree of discrepancy between two attitudes in order to achieve consonance, that is, correspondence. This way he gets rid of discomfort.
The person will avoid situations in which this discomfort may increase.

Since you got a D in the exam, why should you feel discomfort because you didn’t prepare at all, right? Not true. To understand this, let's talk about locus of control.

Casual attribution in psychology. Attribution Examples

This phenomenon exists because everyone wants to see the whole picture, to imagine all the events. But the problem is that the facts are not always known. And then the person begins to finish drawing, to think out the picture, bringing it to a logical conclusion. This process is carried out in accordance with existing life experience. Psychology has noted the diverse reactions of society to stereotypical and deviant behaviors. Let's look at an example.

The students are waiting for a new teacher to teach them history. If you ask them to describe their history teacher, then most likely the classes will be boring and uninteresting. And if you introduce them to another teacher, having previously described his teaching style (he uses visual models, arranges skits, does everything to make the lessons interesting), then the opinion about the person will be non-standard, different from the common habitual judgment.

Causal attribution and locus of control

It should be said that causal attribution is closely related to locus of control.

Locus of control is the characteristic ability of an individual to attribute his successes or failures only to internal or only to external factors.

In the case of causal attribution, there is a double standard. Whereas locus of control shows that a person chooses his own reaction. Having received a bad mark on an exam, he can manifest this locus in two different ways:

It's my own fault that I got a bad grade. I didn’t prepare much, I walked around, I thought about absolutely the wrong things. I'll fix it and start right now.
The ticket, the difficult subject, or the teacher are to blame. If it weren't for this, I would get what I deserve.

The difference between causal attribution and locus of control is the presence of willpower in the second case.

To change your locus of control, you must first get rid of the victim syndrome. Take full responsibility even if external factors really greatly influenced the result.

Attribution when evaluating subordinates

Conflicting attribution biases are typical in any organization. This mainly concerns different situations, namely, existing prejudices.

If managers are asked to talk about the reasons for the ineffectiveness of their subordinates, they mainly cite internal factors as the reasons. They consist of a lack of effort and ability. At the same time, they mention external factors, such as insufficient support, much less often. Thus, there is an overestimation of the influence of individual factors in the behavior of other people. These results indicate a tendency to underestimate the influence of situational factors and exaggerate the influence of individual factors.

Causal attribution and learned helplessness

Causal attribution, interestingly enough, is often used to understand the phenomenon of learned helplessness.

Learned/acquired helplessness is a state of a person in which he does not make attempts to improve his condition (does not try to receive positive stimuli or avoid negative ones), although he has such an opportunity. This happens when he has tried several times to change the situation but failed. And now I’m used to my helplessness.

The father of positive psychology, Martin Seligman, demonstrated in his experiments that people put less effort into solving a “solvable” problem after they had suffered a series of failures at “unsolvable” problems.

Seligman believes that people, having received unsatisfactory results, begin to think that further attempts will also not lead to anything good. But the theory of causal attribution says that people do not try to redouble their efforts in order not to lower their self-esteem, because otherwise they will attribute failure to their internal personal characteristics. If you don’t try, it’s much easier to blame external factors for everything.

Errors of perception

The study of causal attribution has led to the identification of various patterns that lead to perceptual errors. It is noteworthy that people explain the success of strangers and personal failures using situational attribution. Usually we try to treat ourselves softer and more loyal than we treat strangers. But to analyze one’s own successes and the failures of others, personal attribution in psychology is used. This is a feature of the human psyche.

It is also interesting that the reason for success is usually associated with one’s own merits. But failures are blamed on circumstances. A person believes that he is successful because he is hardworking and smart. And his failure was solely due to external factors.

But if we are talking about another person, then attribution in the psychology of communication manifests itself in the opposite way. Example: he is lucky, he is a sneaky and sneaky person, this person’s relationship with the manager is not formal. Or his failures are associated with laziness, insufficient intelligence.

Causal attribution theories

The most popular are two of them.

Jones and Davis Correspondence Theory

Scientists Jones and Davis presented a theory in 1965 that suggested that people pay special attention to intentional behavior (as opposed to random or mindless behavior).

This theory helps to understand the process of internal attribution. Scientists believed that a person is prone to making this error when he perceives inconsistencies between motive and behavior. For example, he believes that if someone behaves friendly, then he is friendly.

Dispositional (i.e. internal) attributes provide us with information from which we can make predictions about a person's future behavior. Davis used the term "correspondent inference" to refer to the case when an observer thinks that a person's behavior is consistent with his personality.

So what leads us to draw a correspondent conclusion? Jones and Davis say that we use five sources of information:

Choice : When behavior is freely chosen, it is said to be driven by internal (dispositional) factors.
Random or intentional behavior : Behavior that is intentional is more likely to be related to the person's personality, while random behavior is more likely to be related to the situation or external causes.
Social desirability : You observe someone sitting on the floor, even though there are empty chairs. This behavior has low social desirability (nonconformity) and is likely to be consistent with the individual's personality.
Hedonic relevance : when another person's behavior is directly intended to benefit or harm us.
Personalism : When another person's behavior seems likely to affect us, we assume that it is "personal" and not simply a by-product of the situation in which we find ourselves.

Kelly covariance model

Kelly's (1967) covariance model is the most famous attribution theory. Kelly developed a logic model for assessing whether a particular action should be attributed to a characteristic (intrinsic) motive or to the environment (extrinsic factor).

The term covariance simply means that a person has information from multiple observations at different times and in different situations and can perceive covariance between the observed effect and its causes.

He argues that in trying to discover the causes of behavior, people act like scientists. In particular, they consider three types of evidence.

Consensus : the degree to which other people behave similarly in a similar situation. For example, Alexander smokes a cigarette when he goes to lunch with his friend. If his friend also smokes, his behavior has a high consensus. If only Alexander smokes, then he is low.
Distinctiveness : The degree to which a person behaves similarly in similar situations. If Alexander smokes only when socializing with friends, his behavior is highly distinctive. If in any place and at any time, then it is low.
Consistency : The extent to which a person behaves in a manner each time a situation occurs. If Alexander smokes only when socializing with friends, consistency is high. If only on special occasions, then it is low.

Let's look at an example to help understand this attribution theory. Our subject is Alexey. His behavior is laughter. Alexey laughs at a comedian’s stand-up performance with his friends.

If everyone in the room laughs, consensus is high. If only Alexey, then low.
If Alexey only laughs at the jokes of a particular comedian, the distinctiveness is high. If she is above everyone and everything, then she is low.
If Alexey only laughs at the jokes of a particular comedian, consistency is high. If he rarely laughs at this comedian's jokes, she is low.

Now if:

everyone laughs at this comedian’s jokes;
and will not laugh at the jokes of the next comedian, given that they usually laugh;

then we are dealing with external attribution, that is, we assume that Alexei laughs because the comedian is very funny.

On the other hand, if Alexey is a person who:

the only one who laughs at this comedian's jokes;
laughs at the jokes of all comedians;
always laughs at the jokes of a particular comedian;

then we are dealing with internal attribution, that is, we assume that Alexey is the kind of person who likes to laugh.

So there are people who attribute causation to correlation. That is, they see two situations following each other and therefore assume that one causes the other.

One problem, however, is that we may not have enough information to make such a decision. For example, if we don't know Alexey very well, we won't necessarily know for sure whether his behavior will be consistent over time. So what should you do?

According to Kelly, we go back to past experiences and:

We repeatedly increase the number of necessary reasons . For example, we see an athlete winning a marathon and we think that he must be a very strong athlete, train hard and be motivated. After all, all this is necessary to win.
Or we increase the number of sufficient reasons . For example, we see that an athlete has failed a doping test and we assume that he was either trying to deceive everyone or accidentally took a prohibited substance. Or maybe he was completely deceived. One reason would be enough.

If your English level is above average, you can watch the following video, in which a teacher from Khan Academy explains the term “covariation” in simple words.

Goals and results of the study of attribution theory

In accordance with the mechanisms of causal attribution, methods for the practical use of the results obtained to influence the effectiveness of human activity, its motivation, emotions and goals are determined. The study of attribution helps to establish the moment at which team members assign or accept personal responsibility for their actions. The results are used to adequately assess the real contribution of a particular participant to the overall corporate activity of the group.

The theory of causal attribution was initially studied only within the framework of social psychology. Now it is used in general, pedagogical, developmental, and also in sports psychology. The main areas of study are self-perception, interpersonal perception, and the perception of a large volume of other social objects.

Conclusion

It is very important to avoid causal attribution, especially when it ruins your life and leads to trouble. Stop your flow of thoughts for a moment and understand the reason for the behavior of a particular person - this is usually enough to avoid making sudden conclusions. This will improve your observation skills and teach you to empathize with others.

In addition, you should understand that there is no problem in attributing your failures to external factors, and your success to internal ones (especially if it is deserved). Just don’t make a blind habit out of it, but look at the situation.

We wish you good luck!

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Mechanisms of attribution theory

The mechanisms of causal attribution are based on the following provisions:

getting to know each other in society, people are not limited to information obtained as a result of external observations: they strive to clarify the reasons for an action and formulate conclusions about personal qualities; Since the information obtained from third-party observation is often insufficient, observers identify probable causes of action and attribute them to the observed participant; the interpretation of reasons has a significant impact on the behavior of the observer.

The most significant results of the study were obtained as a result of studying the mechanisms of causal attribution. Installed:

· 1. systemic differences in a person’s explanation of his own behavior and the actions of other people;

· 2. deviations of the substitution process from logical norms under the influence of subjective factors (informational and motivational);

· 3. stimulating effect that has on a person’s activity and his motivation by explaining unsatisfactory results of such activity by the influence of external factors, and satisfactory results by the influence of internal factors.

One of the most common patterns of the theory is considered to be an overestimation of one’s own importance and an exaggeration of the role of certain factors (such as luck, luck, abilities) in shaping the situation.

Definitions and notations

First of all, we will give a number of definitions related to causal research.

Independent variables, as usual, are those whose values the researcher changes in order to measure the resulting changes in other variables. In the example with bags, this is the brand (“Sportsak” or “Pari sak”), in the example with radio advertising, this is its presence or absence.
Dependent variables are the variables that are measured to change as a result of the independent variables. In the first example, this is the brand of bag named by the respondent; in the second, this is the sales volume of medicines.
Test units are people, organizations or other objects whose response to changes in independent variables is measured. In our examples, these are women who were shown different bags, pharmacies, where radio advertising was or was not used.
External variables are all parameters, with the exception of independent variables, changes in which can affect the reaction of test objects. These variables introduce noise and can weaken and make experimental results unreliable. In the example of pharmacies, these are their size, geographic location, sales volumes and lifespan, that is, variables that must be controlled during experiments.
An experimental design is a set of procedures that determine:
how they are divided into subsamples,
what are the independent variables,
what dependent variables will be measured,
how external variables will be controlled.

Table 3

Now let us introduce a number of symbols

, which will be required when describing experimental plans.

X is a designation for the set of independent variables or events whose effects are being measured. O is the process of observing or measuring a dependent variable on a test object or group of test objects. R - random assignment to one or more test objects of one or another combination of values of independent variables.

Let us accept the following rules for graphically depicting experimental plans.

We will depict movement in time as horizontal movement.
The symbols depicted on one horizontal line will correspond to a group of test objects that are assigned a specific set of influences.
Symbols depicted on the same vertical line correspond to the same point in time.

For example, a symbolic image:

X O1O2

means that a certain impact X was made on this group of test objects, and then the results obtained were measured at moments O1 and O2.

A combination of characters

R X1O1

R X2O2

means that two groups of test units were randomly selected, two different influences were simultaneously applied to them, and then the values of the dependent variables were also measured simultaneously in both groups.

How to keep attribution

Since this phenomenon is an ordinary part of communication, as well as a protective mechanism of the psyche, there is no point in getting rid of it completely. But there are a number of rules to reduce the impact of this phenomenon on communication:

if attribution arose as a defense mechanism, then do not resist it. For example, a person suddenly jumped out at you from around the corner. The subconscious will work clearly, and you will pull back;
When meeting someone, always be friendly, no matter what emotions the person evokes in you. The first impression can be deceiving, but your opponent will remember your communication features for a long time;
Do not discuss other people's appearance and actions. Everything is subjective. You may not have time to wash your hair today, but that doesn't mean you're untidy. Perhaps something happened or the children took more time than usual;
do not answer or think for another person. For example, your husband was in no mood all evening and was reluctant to talk to you. You immediately figured out that he doesn’t love you, is angry about something, etc. In fact, maybe he had trouble at work or something hurts.

Photo by Andrea Piacquadio: Pexels
When communicating and getting to know each other, remember that the other person initially has a different life situation, which may not correspond to what you are used to living with. Therefore, the motives, thoughts, actions of this person will be different from yours and this is normal.

Of course, the technique of our communication is laid down from an early age and develops throughout life. Therefore, work on the peculiarities of perception and further interaction with people will not be one day. First of all, try to remember what your first impression was when meeting old friends. Perhaps it was not true.

Thus, attribution as a perceptual feature is important to understand. Knowing the main mistakes, you will not make them in communication and will be able to build good communications.