Attribution
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Do you attribute your success to your abilities and failure to outside forces? You'll explore possible ways of weighing personal responsibility and environmental factors when trying to determine what caused an outcome.
Internal vs. External Causes of Behavior
When you achieve a goal, do you attribute your success to your abilities or to the situation?
Austrian psychologist Fritz Heider developed attribution theory to explain the process by which we attribute outcomes based on internal behavior and external events. Internal causes include emotions, talent and other personal characteristics, whereas external reasons include environmental factors.
Imagine driving past the scene of an accident on the highway. The driver, who is unharmed, looks very young. Without any knowledge of the situation, you may come to the conclusion that the accident was the driver's fault. We might assume that it was due to inexperience, assigning an internal behavior, the driver's ability, as the cause. In reality, at the time of the accident there was an external factor: a deer ran out in front of the car, causing the driver to swerve off the road to avoid hitting it.
Stable vs. Unstable Causes of Behavior
Cognitive psychologist Bernard Weiner built on Heider's attribution theory to distinguish between stable and uncontrollable causes in evaluating performance. Adding this dimension, internal and external factors could either have unchanging or variable aspects.
For example, a baseball player can have a natural athletic ability, which is an internal-stable factor; however, the amount of effort that they put into batting practice from day to day is an internal-unstable factor.
Hitting a home run is a difficult task, or an external-stable factor, whereas the wind blowing in the right direction at the exact moment the bat hits the ball is pure luck and is thus an external-unstable factor.
Errors in Assigning Cause
The tendency to celebrate our own success as an indication of our internal abilities and failure as a result of external factors is an error recognized as self-serving bias.
For example, a baseball player might claim that his grand slam was due to talent but chalk up losing the game to a bad luck streak.
On the other hand, the common trend of blaming internal behaviors is known as the fundamental attribution error. It's easy to fall into the trap of faulting people rather than situations, as was the case for the car crash example.
A third error in assigning cause is called the just world hypothesis, which assumes that judgments on performance are fair and people get the outcome that they deserve. The error in this logic is that it blames the victim, even when external factors are involved.
When you encounter a homeless person, do you assume they're lazy or do you consider possible external factors, like lack of access to education? According to the National Coalition for Homeless Veterans in 2011, over 30% of the adult homeless population in America served military duty and suffer from a lack of adequate health care, affordable housing and support networks (www.nchv.org).
Summary
We all attribute causes to categorize behaviors and events. Since these attributions influence the way we interact with others, it's important to consider both internal and external reasons which are either controllable or beyond a person's control.