Attribution theory

Attribution theory is a family of psychological theories about how people infer causes of behavior and events, including whether causes are internal or external, stable or changeable.

Causal attribution: An explanation that assigns a cause to an observed behavior or event. Attribution theories describe how people produce and evaluate these causal explanations.
Locus of control: A psychological construct describing whether people expect outcomes to depend on their actions or external forces. It concerns perceived control over outcomes, a judgment closely related to causal explanation.
Achievement motivation: The drive to pursue success and avoid failure in tasks where performance can be evaluated. Explanations of success and failure can alter expectations and effort on later tasks.
Fritz Heider: An Austrian-American psychologist whose work helped establish the study of everyday causal explanation. His analysis of how people explain behavior laid foundations for attribution theory.
Fundamental attribution error: The tendency to overestimate personal causes and underestimate situational causes when explaining others’ behavior. This bias contrasts ordinary causal inference with the accuracy attribution models seek to explain.
Correspondent inference theory: A theory explaining how observers infer dispositions from intentional actions and their effects. It models how an action can be taken as evidence of the actor’s underlying traits.
Internal and external attribution: A distinction between causes located in a person and causes located in the situation. This is the basic causal distinction used across many attribution models.
Learned helplessness: A response pattern in which exposure to uncontrollable adversity reduces attempts to change later outcomes. Attributional explanations of failure help account for why helplessness persists or lifts.
The Psychology of Interpersonal Relations: Fritz Heider’s 1958 book analyzing how people perceive and explain one another’s actions. This book presented Heider’s foundational account of causal explanation in social life.
Self-serving bias: The tendency to take personal credit for success while attributing failure to external causes. It shows how causal explanations can favor the self rather than neutrally assess evidence.

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