Blackwell Reference Online

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As interest in consistency theories waned in the 1960s, new approaches to cognitive research emerged. In the 1970s, and to a lesser extent in the 1980s, attribution research became a dominant force in the field of social psychology. There is no one theory of attribution; rather, several perspectives are collectively referred to as attribution theory. Attribution theory explains how perceivers explain human behaviors by inferring the causes of those behaviors. Frtiz Heider (1958) provided social psychologists with the building blocks for developing attribution research. Heider argued that people strive to understand, predict, and control events in their everyday lives. Laypeople have their own theories about the reasons why certain events occur. Heider encouraged social psychologists to learn from the commonsense, causal reasoning that was presumed to guide their behaviors. Among his important contributions to attribution research was his proposal that in their search for causal structures of events, people attribute causality either to elements within the environment (external attribution) or to elements within the person (internal attribution). Moreover, Heider noted that people have a tendency to overestimate the power of internal causes, such as needs and attitudes, when explaining others’ behavior. Another insight was his distinction between intentional and unintentional behaviors ... log in or subscribe to read full text