Imagine a situation - your new roommate (let's call him Michael) is supposed to pick you up from the station. You are waiting for him at the agreed place, time passes, he is already late 10, 20, 40 minutes. Michael doesn't answer the phone and it stared to rain, so your impatience is growing. After an hour you receive a laconic message: "sorry, I can't come". What do you think about Michael and the reasons for his absence?

You'll probably think that Michael will not be a roommate you can trust. "Why didn't he let me know in advance that he wouldn't be able to come? Did he forget what he promised? He is probably lazy and not very reliable. I won't be surprised if he doesn't pay the rent on time." - such thoughts can be wandering around the head of someone who was exposed by the person he was waiting for.

But explaining why Michel did not come may go in another direction. You can think, for example, of "What if his car broke down? Maybe he is trying to fix it.... But then he would probably warn me at once, so perhaps something serious happened? Maybe he or someone from his family had an accident and he had to rush to hospital? ".

Attribution Theory

Theory of attribution tries to answer the question how people explain the causality of behaviour both theirs and others. In this situation, I described two possible scenarios: in the first one, we blamed Michael's personality for the delay; we attributed him the attribute of laziness and lack of organisation skills; we also imagined the scenario how it could affect his future behaviour; in the second scenario, we thought about the potential causes of situations for which Michael could not come - a car accident or illness of someone close to him. These are examples, respectively, of internal and external attribution.

Internal Attribution

Internal attribution, also known as dispositional attribution, consists in explaining the reasons for a given person's behaviour by means of his/her characteristics (positive or negative). In Michael's case, it was laziness and poor organisational skills, while in different situations, it may be e.g. hostility, selfishness, greed and, in the case of positive attribution - nobility, hard work or high intelligence.

External Attribution

External attribution, on the other hand, is based on explaining the reasons for a person's behaviour by means of external situational factors, that is factors that are independent of the person's behaviour. In the situation described above, these were factors such as accident, or serious illness, but they may also be other random events, such as e.g.: no phone signal or wrong destination address. External attribution also applies to positive phenomena obviously. For example, in the case when our neighbour buys a new car, we can make an external attribution like "he probably won money on the lottery or inherited it" - in this case we do not believe in our neighbour's character and predispositions that would enable him to make up and buy a new car.

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Attribution Asymmetry

Fundamental attribution error

In social life there are very interesting phenomena connected with internal and external attributions. It turns out that people tend to overestimate internal factors (characteristics and dispositions) when it comes to other people's behaviour while underestimating external factors at the same time. This is called fundamental attribution error or correspondence bias.

For this reason, most of us would attribute the blame for failing to pick us up from the train station to Michael's own character traits, not to random factors. Another typical situation is when a mother in a shop shouts at a child - more of us will think that she's a bad mother, but she herself will probably justify her behaviour with an extremely stressful day and weariness.

Actor/observer difference

Why is there such a divergence in the assigned attributions? There are several reasons for this. While judging someone, we focus our attention primarily on the person, not on his/her situation. The situation in which he/she is in (social, material, personal, emotional) is practically invisible to us - we see only a fragment of his/her life in the form of the behaviour.

If we do not know that someone was splashed by a car with dirty water in the morning and, in addition, yesterday had a serious argument with his wife, then his irritations towards us are more likely to be attributed as a result of his vicious nature.

If we don't know that a mother in a shop has lost her job today despite a few days of hard work, it is easier for us to assign her the characteristics of a bad mother. She knows perfectly well the reasons for her anger and irritation, and moreover she knows that she is an exemplary and loving mother everyday except this one, so she will assign her behaviour external attributions.

This difference in perception and attribution is caused by the so-called difference in the perspective of an actor-observer. The observer sees the external behavior of the actor, but does not know "what 'sin his head", who he really is, what did he experience, what he saw.

Two-step attribution process

It seems that attributions are performed in a two-stage process. At first we always carry out internal attribution, i.e. we assume that behaviour results from attributions of a given person. Only later can we modify our assessment taking into account various situation factors. This is another reason why we often make a fundamental attribution error - the second stage requires more effort and attention, so it is often completely skipped. However, the first stage is spontaneous, immediate and it does not require any cognitive effort.

How accurate are our attributions?

As you probably already know, attributions do not always reflect the correct cause-effect sequence of the situation. It turns out that most of the so-called "first impression" (which we deal with in the case of Michael) is wrong. However, Accuracy of other people's representations improves as we get to know them. Whether or not the attribute assigned is real depends on how often we have seen a given person in different types of situations . If we had known Michael for years and knew that he was an incredibly diligent and caring man, we would never think that he could forget about us or that he would not want to come. In other words, accuracy depends on how much information we have about the different factors that have influenced a person's behaviour.

Ego-biased Attributions

Attributions sometimes serve us to maintain self-esteem - we can say that these are attributions in the service of ego. This applies in particular to situations of failure or success. We tend to overestimate our personal role in achieving successes and to blame other people or random situations in the event of our failure. We simply prefer to keep a good idea of ourselves, even if it is at the cost of distortion of reality. These attributions are clearly visible in sports life - when a team wins, its players more often attribute success to their own skills, a coach or specific tactics they used, but when a team loses, we hear more often about the blame of injury, unfair judges or other external factors.

It may be related to the fact that we tend to plan only to achieve success and we think that failure occurs only when something external prevents us from striving for victory. This is also connected with unrealistic optimism, i.e. the belief that good things happen to us more often than to others, and bad things such as an unfortunate accident or illness happen more often to others than to us.

The extent to which one's own attributions are accurate depends on our degree of self-criticism and the ability to realistically evaluate one's own strengths and weaknesses, even at the expense of well-being. Of course, there are also own attributions exaggerated into the negative side and they are typical for depressive states.

Observe attributions around you!

Knowledge of attributions allows us to look a little more clear-headed at what we think about others, how we draw conclusions from the observations of their behaviour and how others judge us. Thanks to the understanding of how this works, we can therefore better understand social interactions and improve them in a significant way. Research shows that marriages in which the spouses attribute positive internal attributions ("He did it because he love me!") and negative external attributions ("She shouted because she had a bad day") to each other are happier, so it is worth taking care of the your own attributions! :)

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Bibliography

Aronson, E., Wilson, T. D., & Akert, R. M. (2007). Social psychology.
ISO 690
Fincham, F. D., & Bradbury, T. N. (1989). The impact of attributions in marriage: An individual difference analysis. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 6(1), 69-85.
Orban-Lembryk, L., & Podgórecki, J. (2007). Atrybucje psychologii społecznej: podręcznik akademicki. Namislavia.
Taylor, S. E., & Fiske, S. T. (1975). Point of view and perceptions of causality. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 32(3), 439.

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Previous entries in the Insight series:

• Insight #1: Brand new psychology series on Steemit! What is insight?
• Insight #2: What emotions are and what are they really for?
• Insight #3: Personality Trait Theory - psychological theory that lead Donald Trump and Brexit to WIN
  

See also

• Alexander von Humboldt - 10 reasons why you should learn about the greatest forgotten scientist and traveller
• First month on Steemit - thoughts, reflections, observations