STUDY UNIT 15.3 Explaining Behavior: The Attributions We Make

Did you ever spend time with a 9-month-old? If you have, maybe you have experienced a baby’s joy at repeatedly dropping a spoon on the floor and giggling to watch you pick it up time and again. Even young infants interact with their world as intuitive scientists, delighted to seek out, identify, and manipulate the levers of cause to get an effect (FIGURE 15.6; Gopnik et al., 2004; Waismeyer et al., 2015). As adults, our methods of understanding the world become more sophisticated, but we continue to search out cause-and-effect relationships to maintain a sense that we can explain, and ideally control, our outcomes (Heine et al., 2006; Pyszczynski et al., 1997).

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A photo of a young girl playing with a toy. She is sitting on a colorful mat as she tries to fit different shapes into openings on a box.

Because other people can be unpredictable, we are motivated to explain and understand why they do what they do. The assignment of a causal explanation for an event, action, or outcome is called an attribution (Heider, 1958). When your best friend doesn’t call or text you on your birthday, is it because they are busy with interviews and forgot or because they are holding a grudge from a recent argument? The explanations we give for people’s behavior can vary in many ways, such as how stable or controllable those causes are.

One of the most important dimensions is whether an event is due to a cause that is external to the person (my friend has a lot going on right now) or internal (my friend is angry or spiteful). Your own reaction will depend on which judgment you make. Recall, from the discussion of dual-processing theories in Study Unit 8.4, that the process by which we make these attributions for someone’s actions can occur largely automatically, based on quick intuitions or biases, or more deliberatively, based on careful calculations of possibilities.

There is often a distinction between the first, default attribution and the more thoughtful one a person eventually settles on. In Western individualistic cultures, the default mode of explanation is often an internal attribution—that people’s behavior is a direct reflection of who they are (Gilbert & Malone, 1995; E. E. Jones & Davis, 1965), a tendency called the fundamental attribution error (E. E. Jones & Harris, 1967; L. D. Ross et al., 1977). For example, say you have just boarded a plane and you overhear a person you can’t see, who is insisting to the flight crew that they be moved from their aisle seat to a window seat. How would you perceive that person and their request for special treatment? Would you simply assume they are being selfish and unreasonable, holding up the flight?

Although your first reaction might be to attribute the request to an internal sense of entitlement and rudeness, consider the possible external factors that might be causing the behavior. Perhaps this person has a disability that makes it difficult for them to move out of the way of other passengers in the row. You might eventually realize that there are legitimate reasons for the passenger’s insistence on being moved, including their reluctance to inconvenience other people. This example highlights that people can override a fundamental attribution error when they stop to consider things external to another person that might be affecting that person’s behavior. The trouble is, people must be motivated and have the cognitive resources for spending the time and effort to do this mental work (Gilbert et al., 1988).

Although social psychologists originally believed that the fundamental attribution error is the universal default attribution, cross-cultural research has revealed some interesting patterns of variation. People raised in collectivistic cultures, where group harmony is valued over individual agency, tend to be more sensitive to situational constraints. They are more likely to think about how individuals adjust their behavior to meet the demands of the environment, including other people’s expectations. When people from collectivistic cultures make attributions for other people’s behavior, they tend to provide a more situational account of what caused the actions. A person can override this tendency, too, by trying to consider the other person’s internal traits and dispositions (Choi & Nisbett, 1998; Choi et al., 1999; J. G. Miller, 1984; M. W. Morris & Peng, 1994).

Although we often rely on our default shortcuts to explain people’s behavior, we are more likely to engage in effortful attributions when another person’s actions are very surprising or negative. For example, extreme and unusual events, like the school shooting in Parkland, Florida in 2018, can inspire efforts to sort out exactly why the shooter engaged in such a horrific act (FIGURE 15.7). When we conclude that a person’s actions are unique to them and would be actions they might repeat in that same situation and in other contexts, we assume that something internal to the actor best explains the behavior (H. H. Kelley, 1973).