4.1:
Attribution Theory
Understanding why people do what they do can be challenging. One might choose to focus on the person and how certain traits and character differences affect the way they behave, like thinking someone is rude if they remove clothes from a dryer in use.
Or, on the flip side, they can concentrate on the role of situational factors—based on the social circumstances at hand. Perhaps, he’s oblivious and just in a hurry to meet a new date.
These attributes—either to the person’s disposition or to their social situation—form the basis of the attribution theory—that individuals often explain another’s behavior by crediting one or the other.
Given a different situation, that so-called disrespectful guy is actually very polite. This example illustrates the power that situational factors have over judgments of personality.
4.1:
Attribution Theory
Behavior is a product of both the situation (e.g., cultural influences, social roles, and the presence of bystanders) and of the person (e.g., personality characteristics). Subfields of psychology tend to focus on one influence or behavior over others. Situationism is the view that our behavior and actions are determined by our immediate environment and surroundings. In contrast, dispositionism holds that our behavior is determined by internal factors (Heider, 1958). An internal factor is an attribute of a person and includes personality traits and temperament.
The Attribution Lens
Social psychologists have tended to take the situationist perspective, whereas personality psychologists have promoted the dispositionist perspective. Moreover, in the United States, the predominant culture tends to favor a dispositional approach in explaining human behavior. Why do you think this is? We tend to think that people are in control of their own behaviors, and, therefore, any behavior change must be due to something internal, such as their personality, habits, or temperament. However, modern approaches to social psychology take both the situation and the individual into account when studying human behavior (Fiske, Gilbert, & Lindzey, 2010). In fact, the field of social-personality psychology has emerged to study the complex interaction of internal and situational factors that affect human behavior (Mischel, 1977; Richard, Bond, & Stokes-Zoota, 2003).
This text is adapted from OpenStax, Psychology. OpenStax CNX.