Attribution

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Attribution is a concept in social psychology. When people watch the world, they do not see it as a completely random stream of happenings, but tend to attribute meanings to things. So, for example when you see someone fall over, you can attribute this to a stable trait ("clumsiness"), or to a feature of the situation ("banana peel on the floor"), or to random chance ("just one of those crazy flukes").

There are a number of theories about the orderly ways in which people make these attributions (see attribution theory), and about how they might fall into bias and error (see attributional bias, and fundamental attribution error), and the process through which we seek to identify the causes of others' behavior and so gain knowledge of their stable traits and dispositions.

[edit] See also

• Attitudes
• Blame
• Causal analysis
• Harold Kelley
• Impression management
• Inference
• Internal external locus of control
• Learned helplessness
• Self fulfilling prophecies

This page uses content from the English-language version of Wikipedia. The original article was at Attribution. The list of authors can be seen in the page history. As with Psychology Wiki, the text of Wikipedia is available under the GNU Free Documentation License.