How Do People Explain Their Own and Other People’s Behaviour?

C81S0CStudent ID number: 4233772Word Count: 1589

How do people explain their own and other people’s behaviour?

The term ‘behaviour’ refers to the observable activity of an organism; anything an organism does that involves an action or a response to stimulation (Wallace et al, 1991). This broad nature of behaviour makes it difficult to attach a precise meaning to an individual’s behaviour or their explanation of other people’s behaviour. In order to understand the origin of behaviour and the behaviour of others, social psychologists have used a process called attribution.  The Attribution theory looks around the explanation of an individual's behaviour and their perception of other’s behaviour. The theory deals with “how the social perceiver uses information to arrive at causal explanations for events. It examines what information is gathered and how it is combined to form a causal judgment” (Fiske & Taylor, 1991). In other words, attribution can be seen as a way of inferring the causes of events or behaviours.

Over the course of this work, I will look at three of the main theoretical emphases of the Attribution theory: Heider’s (1958) theory of naïve psychology; Jones & Davis’ (1965) theory of correspondent inference and Kelley’s (1967) covariation model and evaluate them. I will also look at the explanations of bias and error within the Attribution theory, while giving examples as I go along.

To begin with, Heider (1958) was the first to offer a theory of attribution. In which he labeled the average layman as a ‘naïve psychologist’, someone who attributes causes to effects in attempt to make sense of the world around them. This model highlights the early attribution theories of human behaviour that was prominent in social psychology during the 1970s (Hogg &Vaughan, 2014, 43). The naïve scientist model believes people have a rational, logical and analytical understanding of their world. It assumed that any errors or biases that came up were due to incomplete information and to motivational considerations such as personal gains. Heider (1958) created the need to identify two main ideas: internal (personal) and external (situational) factors. Internal attribution would look at personal characteristics like personality traits where as external attribution would consider the situation or the event outside an individual’s control, like environmental features. Thus Heider’s attribution theory revolves around the processes that make our daily circumstances predictable and this is perhaps why attribution research is applicable to such a wide range of areas. Heider believed that because internal attribution is a internal process it is not shown and thus their presence is only made clear if there are no external causes.

However, Scherer (1978) counter argued this as his study found that people made assumptions about the stable personality traits of complete strangers simply on the basis of hearing their voices on the telephone. This shows bias in people as they prefer internal to external attributions even in the face of evidence for external causality (Hogg & Vaughan, 2014, 84). The limitation of this theory is that Heider (1958) assumes the internal factors that the naïve psychologists make responsible for a behavioural outcome, such as a win or loss; contain both a relatively stable cause like capability and power; and a relatively variable and controllable one such as motivation and intention (Försterling, 2013, 23). Future studies began to make it clear that even in ideal situations it was not necessary that people responded like careful scientists at all. Nisbett and Ross (1980) proposed that the social norm dictated people to be limited in their ability to process information and thus took cognitive shortcuts where they would use the least complex and demanding cognitions that were able to make commonly adaptive behaviours; they labelled them as cognitive misers. Whereas Fiske & Taylor (1991) highlight the importance of motivation in attribution and characterises the social thinker as a motivated tactician, someone who has multiple cognitive strategies available and chooses among them based on goals, motives, and need (Fiske & Taylor, 1991, 13).  This suggests that people explain their own and other people’s behaviour by tactically taking into consideration their personal wants and goals.

An alternative theory of attribution comes from John and Davis (1965) and their correspondent inference theory. They thought that people make inferences about others in cases where the actions behind the behaviour are intentional rather than accidental or not thought of. For example, when there is a noticeable correspondence between someone behaving in a polite manner and being a polite person. The theory focuses on five cues, which reflects the true characteristics of the individual: Their action must be freely chosen, must show accidental behaviour, not socially desirable, hedonistic relevance and show personalism. The term ‘correspondent inference’ thus refers to an occasion when an observer infers that a person’s behaviour matches or corresponds with their personality (McLeod, 2010). This theory insinuates that people’s insights of both their personal and other’s behaviour can be see as correspondent of their own personality traits and views.

There have been some experiments, which both support and limit the correspondent inference theory. An example of an experiment that supports the correspondent theory comes from Jones and Harris (1967). In their study they found that a group of American students were making attributions for speeches made by other students managed to make more correspondent inference for freely picked socially unpopular leaders, for instance, students freely chose to make a speech in support of Cuba’s President at the time, Fidel Castro (Hogg & Vaughan, 2014, 85). But through time the correspondent inference theory has declined in importance as an attribution theory. Hewstone (1989) argued that the theory’s basis depends to a large degree on the attribution of intentionality, yet unintentional behaviour, like laziness can be a sufficient indicator of a correspondent inference as the individual could be a lazy person. This study argues that correspondent inference cannot solely be used to explain people’s behaviour, as it does not take into consideration unintentional behaviour as well as other individualistic factors, which may cause the person to act in a certain way.

Another theory of attribution is Kelley’s (1967) co-variation model.  His model explains how when a person tried to explain their own or others’ certain behaviour they use multiple observations to try identify factors both internal (characteristics) and external (environment), dealing with both social perception and self-perception. Kelley believed that there were three types of causal information, which influenced our judgments: The Consensus was the extent to which others behaved in the same way in a similar situation; distinctiveness referred to the extent which the person behaves in the same way in similar situations; and consistency of the person in behaving the same every time the situation occurs (McLeod, 2010). One of the first studies to test Kelley’s (1967) model was McArthur (1972) who revealed that not all possible causes (traits, views, entity) are selected with the same likelihood and there seems to be a general preference for making attributions to the person (internal). The study found that 82% of the participants made attributions to the person in the conditioned situation where the effect co-varied with the persona and not with the situational or the environmental areas (Försterling, 2013, 82). Nisbett and Ross (1980) further argued that there is no guarantee that people explaining their own or others’ behaviours are using the co-variation principle as they may attribute causality to whatever causal agent appears to be similar to the effect. Thus Kelley’s (1967) model may look at a variety of factors but even they cannot be definitive in explaining people’s own and other’s behaviour in all cases.