What is causal attribution?

Introduction

When an individual hears about the behavior of a serial killer, sees a person shoplift, or is rejected by a friend, that person may ask why such behaviors or events occurred. Identifying the causes of behaviors may help people learn what kind of behaviors they can expect. People speculate about the causes of positive behaviors as well. For example, one may want to understand why a great athlete has set a number of records, why someone received a job promotion, or why one did well on a test.

The study of causal attribution focuses on the explanations that people make about the causes of their own or other people’s behavior. Researchers in this area have gone beyond identifying attributions to trying to understand why people make the attributions that they do. Research on causal attribution has contributed to an understanding of many other aspects of people’s behavior, such as attitude change, interpersonal attraction, and helping behavior.

Classifications

Attribution theories classify causal attributions in a number of ways. One of the most important classifications is whether the attribution is made to an internal state or an external force. Internal attributions are made to causes internal to the person, such as individual personality characteristics, moods, and abilities. For example, one may attribute the cause of a shoplifter’s behavior to kleptomania, of a friend’s rejection to one’s own lack of social skills, and of an athlete’s records to his or her ability. External attributions, on the other hand, are made to causes external to the person, such as characteristics of the environment. Thus, the shoplifter’s behavior might be perceived to be caused by a broken home, a friend’s rejection by some characteristic of the friend (for example, lack of loyalty), and the athlete’s record to the efforts of the team.

Causal attributions are also classified according to their stability. Stable causes are relatively permanent and are consistent across time. Unstable causes fluctuate across time. Internal and external causes may be either stable or unstable. For example, a person’s ability is usually considered internal and stable, whereas effort is internal and unstable. Laws are external and stable, whereas the weather is external and unstable. If shoplifting is attributed to kleptomania, the cause is internal and stable; if shoplifting is attributed to a dare from someone, the cause is external and unstable.

Bernard Weiner includes a third classification for causal attributions, that of controllability or uncontrollability: Some causes are within a person’s control, whereas others are not. In this approach, controllability can exist with any combination of the internal/external and stable/unstable dimensions. Thus, ability—an internal, stable cause—is largely perceived as uncontrollable. For example, people have little control over whether they have the ability to distinguish green from red. On the other hand, effort—an internal, unstable cause—is perceived as controllable. A student can choose whether or not to study hard for a test.

Kelley’s Theory

Psychological research on causal attributions has gone beyond the classification of attributions. Psychologists have developed theories that help predict the circumstances under which people make various attributions. In this regard, Harold Kelley’s theory has been extremely useful in making predictions about how people make internal and external attributions. From Kelley’s perspective, attributions are made on the basis of three kinds of information: distinctiveness, consensus, and consistency.

Information about distinctiveness is derived from knowing the extent to which a person performs a certain behavior only in a certain situation. For example, the behavior of a person who only steals items from stores has higher distinctiveness than the behavior of a person who steals from stores, people’s homes, and people on the street. According to Kelley, a behavior low in distinctiveness is likely to elicit an internal attribution. Thus, the behavior of a person who steals in a number of situations is more likely to be explained by an internal attribution (kleptomania) than by an external one.

Information about consensus is derived from knowing the way in which other people respond to the stimulus object. If the behavior is shared by a large number of people—if everyone steals items from stores, for example—the behavior has higher consensus than if few people steal from stores. A behavior high in consensus is likely to elicit an external attribution. If everyone steals from a certain store, there might be something about the store that elicits shoplifting.

Finally, information about consistency is derived from knowing how the person responds over time. If the person shoplifts most of the times that he or she shops, the behavior has higher consistency than if the person shoplifts occasionally. According to Kelley, behaviors high in consistency are likely to elicit internal attributions. Thus, the behavior of a person who shoplifts much of the time is likely to be explained by an internal attribution (kleptomania).

Kelley’s theory has generated many more predictions than those described here. His theory, along with those of other attribution researchers, assumes that people have a need to predict behavior. If behavior is predictable, the world becomes a more controllable place in which to live.

Role of Emotions

One of the earlier applications of the research on causal attributions by social psychologists was in understanding emotions. Stanley Schachter and Jerome Singer proposed that perceptions of emotions are influenced by the physiological arousal that a person feels and by the cognitive label that the person uses (for example, “I’m jealous” or “I’m angry”). They argued that the physiological arousal is the same for all emotions. For example, a rapid heart rate can be the result of intense love or intense anger. According to Schachter and Singer, when someone feels physiologically aroused, the person looks to the situation to label his or her feelings. If someone is unaware of the true source of his or her arousal, it is possible for him or her to misattribute that arousal to a plausible cause.

An example can illustrate this approach. When “George” began drinking coffee as a teenager, he was unaware of the physiologically arousing effects of caffeine. He can recall drinking too much coffee one morning and getting in an argument about some issue. The caffeine created arousal; however, because George was in an argument, he attributed the cause of his arousal to his being angry. As a result of that attribution, he acted in an angry manner. Thus, George misattributed the physiological arousal produced by the caffeine to a feeling of anger.

Various psychological investigations have used this attributional approach. In an experiment on romantic attraction by Gregory White, Sanford Fishbein, and Jeffrey Rutsein, male subjects ran in place for 120 seconds (high physiological arousal) or 15 seconds (low physiological arousal) and were presented with a picture of an unattractive or attractive woman. Subsequently, the subjects were asked to evaluate the woman in terms of romantic attractiveness. Male subjects with high physiological arousal indicated that they were more romantically attracted to the attractive woman than did the male subjects with less physiological arousal. Similarly, in an experiment on crowding by Stephen Worchel and Charles Teddie, subjects sat close (high physiological arousal) or far apart (low physiological arousal). For some of the subjects, there were pictures on the wall; for other subjects, there were no pictures on the wall. Subsequently, subjects were asked how crowded they felt. For the subjects with high physiological arousal, those with no pictures on the wall indicated that they felt more crowded than did those with pictures on the wall. Without pictures on the wall, the subjects could only attribute their arousal to other people. In each of these examples, the subjects used an external cue to label their internal state (emotion).

Learned Helplessness

Causal attributions have also been used to understand the phenomenon of learned helplessness.
Martin E. P. Seligman
has demonstrated in a number of experiments that people take longer to solve soluble problems after they have tried and failed to solve a series of insoluble problems than if they had not been presented with the insoluble problems. Seligman initially proposed that people did not try harder on the soluble problems because they learned that their outcomes (failures on the insoluble problems) were independent of what they did. From an attributional perspective, however, the argument would be that people do not try harder on the soluble problems because it is less damaging to their self-esteem to attribute their failure on the insoluble problems to a lack of effort, an internal, unstable cause, rather than to an internal, stable cause, such as ability. People can then retain the belief that they can always do better next time if they try harder. Research favors the attributional interpretation of learned helplessness, as is indicated by the research of Arthur Frankel and Melvin Snyder.

Excuse Theory

An area in which causal attribution has played a crucial role is in excuse theory as proposed by C. R. Snyder. People make excuses to protect themselves from their failure experiences, as excuses help them feel that they are not totally responsible for their failures. Kelley’s attribution theory was influential in the development of Snyder’s model of excuse making. People can excuse a poor performance by using consensus-raising excuses, consistency-lowering excuses, or distinctiveness-raising excuses.

When people employ distinctiveness-raising excuses, they claim that the poor performance is specific to one situation and not generalizable to others (“I performed poorly only in this class”). When people employ consistency-lowering excuses, they claim that they have a poor performance occasionally, not frequently (“This was the only time I performed poorly”). Finally, when people employ consensus-raising excuses, they claim that everyone performed as poorly as they did (“This test was so hard that everyone did poorly on it”). George Whitehead and Stephanie Smith have examined the impact of an audience on the use of consensus-raising excuses. They found that people are less likely to use consensus-raising excuses in public than in private. Thus, one is more likely to say, “This test was hard, and everyone did poorly on it,” to oneself than to one’s teacher, who knows how everyone else performed.

Evolution of Research

The basic ideas for causal attribution were presented by Fritz Heider in his 1958 book The Psychology of Interpersonal Relations. From the richness of Heider’s writings, a number of social psychologists have generated different attributional theories. One problem with this research area, as with other research areas in social psychology, is that no single theory effectively encompasses all the different ideas proposed by causal attribution theorists. Nevertheless, causal attribution research has played an important role in the history of psychology because of its emphasis on cognition—that is, how people think.

In the late 1950s, when Heider published his book, and the early 1960s, when Schachter and Singer did their experiment regarding emotion, psychology was heavily influenced by behaviorism and had been for many years. From a behavioristic perspective, the study of thinking was in disrepute because it involved processes that were largely unobservable. Theorizing about causal attribution involved theorizing about how people think about the causes of behavior. Today, as can be seen from the amount of research on causal attribution and other cognitive processes, psychologists’ interest in cognition has broadened.

Early research on causal attribution generally supported the theories being tested but often found that they had limitations as well. For example, research on Kelley’s attribution theory found that people do use information about distinctiveness, consensus, and consistency when making attributions, and Kelley’s theory further suggests that each type of information should be considered equally important in the attribution process. Subsequent research, however, indicated that consensus information may be underutilized in certain circumstances.

One important area of research is the influence of culture on causal attributions. Much of the theorizing and empirical research on causal attribution has been done in the United States. It is important to know whether the phenomena that psychologists have documented among people in the United States generalize to people from other cultures. Evidence from several sources has indicated that people from the United States attribute outcomes more to internal causes than do people from developing nations, which is believed to reflect different cultural traditions.

Once the causal attributions that people make are understood, research can focus on the consequences of these attributions. For example, when people excuse a poor performance, they should feel better about themselves. Also, when people attribute their positive outcomes to internal factors, their feelings about themselves should be better than when they attribute their positive outcomes to external factors. This area is one of many that is likely to receive more attention from social psychological researchers in the future.

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