Casual attribution: the meaning of the concept and its application

It often happens that people try to explain the strange or defiant behavior of another person, relying on their own perception of the whole situation. When this happens, a person simply interprets the act and its motives in such a way as if he himself did it.

Psychological substitution

Such psychological substitution of actors has a complex name in psychology - casual attribution. This means that someone has insufficient information about the situation or about the person who appears in this situation, and therefore tries to explain everything from his own point of view. Casual attribution implies that a person "puts himself in the place of another" for lack of other ways to explain the situation. Of course, such an interpretation of the motives of behavior is often erroneous, because each person thinks in his own way, and it is almost impossible to "try" his thinking on another person.

The emergence of the theory of attribution in psychology

The concept of "causal attribution" in psychology appeared not so long ago - only in the middle of the 20 th century. Entered by his American psychologists-sociologists Harold Kelly, Fritz Haider and Lee Ross. This not only became widely used, but also acquired its own theory. Researchers believed that casual attribution would help them explain the mechanisms of interpreting the average person some cause-effect relationships or even their own behavior. When a person commits a moral choice that leads to certain actions, he always conducts a dialogue with himself. The attribution theory tries to explain how this dialogue goes on, what are its stages and result, depending on the psychological characteristics of the person. At the same time, a person, analyzing his behavior, does not identify him with the behavior of strangers. It's easy to explain this: someone else's soul is dark, and a person knows much better.

Attribution classification

As a rule, each theory presupposes the existence of certain indicators that are mandatory for its functioning. Casual attribution, therefore, presupposes the presence of two indicators at once. The first indicator is the factor of conformity of the considered action to so-called social-role expectations. For example, if a person has very little or no information about a certain person, the more he will invent and attribute, and the stronger he will be convinced of his own rightness.

The second indicator is the correspondence of the behavior of the person in question to generally accepted cultural and ethical norms. The more norms another person violates, the more active will be the attribution. The very phenomenon of "attribution" happens in the theory of attribution of three kinds:

• Personal (the cause-effect relationship is projected onto the subject himself, who commits the action);
• Object (the link is projected to the object, on which this action is directed);
• Circumstantial (the link is attributed to the circumstances).

Mechanisms of casual attribution

It is not surprising that a person who talks about the situation "from outside", without participating in it directly, explains the actions of other participants of the situation from the personal point of view. If he directly participates in the situation, he takes into account the circumstantial attribution, that is, he first considers the circumstances, and only then assigns certain personal motives to someone.

Being active participants of the society, people try not to draw conclusions about each other, based only on external observations. As you know, appearance is often deceptive. That's why casual attribution helps people formulate some conclusions, based on the analysis of the actions of others, "missed" through a filter of their own perception. Of course, such conclusions also do not always correspond to reality, because it is impossible to judge a person from one particular situation taken. Man is too complex a creature to talk so easily about it.

Why casual attribution is not always good

There are many examples in the literature and cinema, when the errors of casual attribution led to the destruction of human lives. A very good example is the film "Atonement", where the little main character makes a conclusion about another character, only based on the features of her own child perception of the situation. As a consequence, the lives of many people are ruined only because it is something they misunderstood. The probable causes that we assume are very often erroneous, so you can never talk about them as ultimate truth, even if it seems that there can be no doubt. If we can not understand even our own inner world, what can we say about the inner world of another person? We must strive to analyze the indisputable facts, not our own conjectures and doubts.