ATTRIBUTION THEORY The attribution theory was made by Gestalt Psychologist Fritz Heider and was written in his book “The Psychology of Interpersonal Relations”. The attribution theory is a method of how people interpret the people around them. Heider believed that people are psychologists in their own way. They may even speculate things that have not happened yet such as relationships and future events based on their observation. Subsequent scholars such as Jones and Davis (1965), Kelley (1967), and Weiner (1980) further refined this theory and presented their own versions. All of their versions of the theory will be thoroughly discussed in this paper.
HEIDER’S ATTRIBUTION MODEL …show more content…
The theory discussed the way people evaluate other people’s actions and choices and determine alternatives internally. It also showed how people compare their own actions with other people’s actions and think about what they would have done if they were in the other person’s shoes. “Davis used the term correspondent inference to refer to an occasion when an observer infers that a person’s behaviour matches or corresponds with their personality. It is an alternative term to dispositional attribution” (McLeod, 2010). Jones and Davis presented five (5) sources of information that people draw their interpretations of a person’s behaviour from:
• Choice
• Accidental vs. Intentional Behaviour
• Social …show more content…
People focus on internal forces rather than external forces in determining the cause of a person’s action. On the other hand, external attribution (also called situational attribution) attributes the behaviour of a person to a situation or event that a person cannot control. These situations are independent to the person such as the weather and other natural events but it greatly affects the actions done by that person. These ideas were very influential to succeeding scholars who also researched on this