3.2 Attribution Theory
“how and why we try to answer”how and why" questions is referred to as attribution theory" (L. Baxter and Braithwaite 2008)
originated from psychology. “The more important or unexpected the event, the more likely people are to seek an explanation to make sense of that outcome. We make sense of such events primarily by determining what the cause is.”
Goals
- Event causation: understand actions or events by attributing cause(s) to behavior.
- Trait inference: make inference about a person’ characteristics that makes sense of that person’s behavior.
Dimensions when making attributions:
- locus: interval or external to the person
- Stability: temporary or enduring
- Specificity: causes is unique or universal
- Responsibility: the extent to which a person contribute to the event
Focus on:
Correspondence: “When attributions are informative of a person’s nature or personality, they are considered "correspondent" (i.e., we perceive that another’s behavior corresponds to some underlying characteristic of who that person is).”
Covariation: “Events are attributed to causes with which they covary.”
Responsibility: the more internal, intentional, and controllable we perceive one’s behavior is, the more we hold that person responsible for those actions, and their consequences"
Bias:
- “fundamental attribution bias, which is a tendency to make more internal attributions than external attributions for other people’s behaviors” (L. Ross 1977)
- self-serving bias: people generally make more internal, stable, and global attributions for positive events than for negative events, and more external attributions for negative events than for positive events (Malle 2006)
Attribution Theory in Communication:
- Attribution as Explanations behind social communicative actions.
- Attribution as reason for actions and outcomes: when we think of reasons for other’s communication or behaviors, it affects how we view others, and our communication toward them.
- Attribution as the meanings given to a behavior: “how attributions reflect the meaning that people give to a communication act.”
Evaluation:
- Explanatory power: intuitive
- Scope and generality: applicability, born as universal theory of human sense-making, but actual application was limited
- Conditionship specification: strict parameters for the theory.
- Verifiability/ Falsifiability: a lot of research supports, few say the theory is flawed.