SEEKING THE CAUSES OF BEHAVIOUR 45

Should we be worried about our cognitive biases? Although social inference is

not as good as it could be, it is generally adequate and well adapted to everyday
life – so ‘remedies’ for our shortcomings may not actually be necessary (Funder,
1987). For example, on encountering a pit bull terrier in the street, it might be very
adaptive to rely on availability (media coverage of attacks by pit bull terriers) and
to flee automatically rather than think long and deeply about what to do: an error
in the laboratory might be a disaster in the field.
Of course, not being accurate can have some undesirable consequences. One of
these is when people form inaccurate impressions of others, or develop stereotypes
of minorities. However, it is possible to improve on our intuitive inferential strate­
gies, for example, through formal education in scientific and rational thinking and
in understanding statistical techniques (Nisbett, Krantz, Jepson & Fong, 1982).

Seeking the causes of behaviour

A key motive behind social inference is to gain sufficient understanding of other
people to predict how they will behave, how they will treat us, how we should
behave and more generally how the course of interaction will play out. All of us are
in the business of constructing a representation of our social world that makes it a
predictable and controllable – a place in which we can reliably make things happen.
The most powerful way to do this is to have an understanding of what causes
what, being able to attribute causes to behaviour and events (Forsterling &
Rudolph, 1988). This is the business of formal science, but not surprisingly we
also do this automatically and informally almost all the time. The famous Austrian
psychologist Fritz Heider (1958) thought of humans as ‘naive’ or lay psychologists
who constantly construct their own informal theories to explain and predict how
people will behave.

How do we attribute causality, why is it important?

People as naive psychologists
Fritz Heider (1958) drew the attention of social psychologists to the importance of
studying people’s naive, or commonsense, psychological theories. He believed that
these theories are important in their own right because they influence behaviour.
For example, people who believe in astrology are likely to have different expecta­
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tions and are likely to act in different ways from those who do not. Heider believed
that people are intuitive psychologists who construct causal theories of human Internal (or
behaviour, and because such theories have the same form as systematic scientific dispositional)
social psychological theories, people are actually intuitive or naive psychologists. attribution
Heider made a lasting distinction between personal factors (e.g. personality, abil­ Process of assigning
the cause of our own
ity) and environmental factors (e.g. situations, social pressure) in the way that we
or others’ behaviour to
account for the causes for behaviour. The former are examples of an internal (or internal or dispositional
dispositional) attribution and the latter of an external (or situational) attribution. factors.
So, for example, it might be useful to know whether someone you meet at a party
External (or
who seems aloof and distant is an aloof and distant person or is acting in that
situational) attribution
way because she is not enjoying that particular party. Heider believed that because Assigning the cause
internal causes, or intentions, are hidden from us, we can infer their presence only of our own or others’
if there are no clear external causes. However, as we see below, people tend to be behaviour to external or
biased in preferring internal to external attributions even in the face of evidence for environmental factors.

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 46 Chapter 2 SOCIAL THINKING

external causality. It seems that we readily attribute behaviour to stable properties

of people. Klaus Scherer (1978), for example, found that people made assumptions
about the stable personality traits of complete strangers simply on the basis of hear­
ing their voices on the telephone.

People as everyday scientists

Covariation model A well-known theory of how attributions are made is Harold Kelley’s (1967) covaria-
Kelley’s theory of causal tion model. A key question that people ask themselves is whether someone’s behaviour
attribution – people is caused by the person’s internal disposition to behave in that way (their personal­
assign the cause ity) or by external situational factors. This allows us to know whether the person will
of behaviour to the
always behave in a certain way or whether the behaviour is tied to the situation – is
factor that covaries
most closely with the Jane being nice to me because she likes me (an internal dispositional cause) or because
behaviour. we are working on something together and being nice helps get the task done (an
external situational cause)? This much is in line with what Heider had observed.
Kelley went on to argue that in order to discover a cause of someone’s behav­
iour people act much like scientists, rather than naive psychologists. They identify
what factor covaries with the behaviour and then assign that factor a causal role.
People use this covariation principle to decide whether to attribute a particular act
to internal dispositions (e.g. personality) or external environmental factors (e.g.
social pressure). To make this attributional decision people consider three types of
information: consistency, distinctiveness and consensus.
If Jane only sometimes behaves in a particular way, for example giggles, in a given
situation then consistency is low and we look for alternative causes. If on the other
hand Jane always giggles in the same situation consistency is high but we still don’t
know whether the giggling reflects Jane’s personality or the situation. Assuming high
consistency, people can assess the distinctiveness of the behaviour (distinctiveness is
low if Jane giggles all the time, high if Jane only giggles in this situation) and whether
there is high consensus (every one giggles in this situation) or low consensus (only
Jane giggles in this situation). The conjunction of high distinctiveness and consensus
leads to an external attribution (Jane’s giggling is due to the situation), and the con­
junction of low distinctiveness and consensus leads to an internal attribution (Jane’s
giggling is due to Jane – she is simply the sort of person who giggles).
Research shows that people certainly can make causal attributions for behaviour
in this way (Kassin, 1979; McArthur, 1972), however, they under-use consensus
information and are generally not very good at assessing covariation. Also, just
because people can perform these laborious attributional analyses, it does not mean
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that in everyday life they actually do it or do it all the time.

Acts that are stable and controlled

Bernard Weiner (1979, 1986) was interested in the causes and consequences of the
sorts of attribution people make when they succeed or fail on a task – for example,
how students interpret their performance in examinations. He believed that in
making an achievement attribution, we consider three performance dimensions.
The first is locus, which once again features internal and external causes. The next
two are new and interesting: stability and controllability.
Let us say that your classmate Helga fails in her psychology examination, and we
think this was caused by ‘unusual hindrance from others’ (the top right-hand box in
Figure 2.4). Now, you know that Helga is intelligent (therefore, failure in this case
is an external factor). You also know that she was seriously disturbed by Bevan. He
should never have been there – his eyes were running from a bout of hay fever, he

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 SEEKING THE CAUSES OF BEHAVIOUR 47

Internal External

Stable Unstable Stable Unstable

Consistent help Unusual help

Controllable Typical effort Unusual effort or hindrance or hindrance
from others from others

Uncontrollable Ability Mood Task difficulty Luck

Figure 2.4
Achievement attributions as a function of locus, stability and controllability.
How we attribute someone’s task achievement depends on:
• Locus – is the performance caused by the actor (internal) or the situation (external)?
• Stability – is the internal cause a stable or unstable one?
• Controllability – to what extent is future task performance under the actor’s control?

kept sneezing throughout, and he was sitting next to poor Helga. So let us look to
the future: in future examinations Bevan might not be present (an unstable factor),
or Helga could choose to sit well away from Bevan if he turns up (a controllable
factor). In total, there are eight different ways of explaining task performance.
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Controllability. According to Weiner’s attribution model, these athletes may attribute

their success to unusually hard training – an internal but unstable attribution.
Source: AAP Image / Tim Clayton

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 48 Chapter 2 SOCIAL THINKING

Weiner’s model is a dynamic one, in that people first assess whether someone has
succeeded or failed and accordingly experience positive or negative emotion. They
then make a causal attribution for the performance; further, people can experience
specific emotions (e.g. pride for doing well due to ability) and expectations that
influence future performance.
Weiner’s model is relatively well supported by experiments that provide
participants with performance outcomes and locus, stability and controll­ability
information, often under role-playing conditions (e.g. de Jong, Koomen &
Mellenbergh, 1988). However, critics have suggested that the controllability dimen­
sion may be less important than was first thought. They have also wondered to
what extent people outside controlled laboratory conditions really analyse achieve­
ment in this way.

Causal attribution in action

In this section we look first at the way we make attributions about ourselves,
and in particular about explaining our emotions. Next we note that people can
differ in their emotional styles. We close by considering how our attributions for
other people’s motives can impact our close relationships.

Self-perception
If you can attribute an act internally to a person’s disposition you now know some­
thing about that person – his or her personality. Daryl Bem (1972) pinpointed an
Self-perception interesting implication of this in his self-perception theory. He argued that: (1) we
theory make attributions for our own behaviour in the same way as we make attributions for
Bem’s idea that we gain others’ behaviour; and (2) it is through internal attribution of our own behaviour that
knowledge of ourselves we gain knowledge about ourselves, our self-concept and identity (see Chapter 3).
only by making
self-attributions: for
example, we infer our Explaining our emotions
own attitudes from our Making attributions also plays a role in defining emotions. Our emotions have
own behaviour. two distinct components: a state of physiological arousal, and cognitions that we
use to label the arousal as an emotion, such as fear or excitement. Although the
arousal and label usually go hand-in-hand and our thoughts can generate the asso­
ciated arousal, in some cases unexplained arousal could be experienced as different
emotions depending on what kind of attributions we make for what we are experi­
encing. A major contributor to theory and research in this area is Stanley Schachter
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(1964; for a review of his work see Reisenzein, 1983). One of his experiments dealt
with ‘emotional lability’. See Box 2.3 and Figure 2.5 to see the components in the
process of attributing an emotion in this experiment.
Being emotionally labile can help in therapy. Valins and Nisbett (1972) won­
dered if the process of making attributions could be used to treat emotional
disorders. For example, might someone who is chronically anxious learn to
re-label the arousal as happiness, transform depression into contentment, or
attribute shyness to external factors rather than their own social anxiety? While
some experiments suggest this could work (e.g. Olson, 1988), in general what
is a mis-attribution effect is limited to the laboratory, unreliable and short-lived
(Forsterling, 1988; Parkinson, 1985).

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 SEEKING THE CAUSES OF BEHAVIOUR 49

Research classic 2.3

The context affects how we label an emotion

In the late nineteenth century the famous psycholo- heart rate), but were not informed what the drug was
gist William James turned the usual account of how we or what would happen. The aim was to show that the
experience an emotion on its head. As ordinary folk, drug-induced arousal would be interpreted differently
we might believe that our mental images cause the according to the context, of which there were two.
body to react, and define our feelings as an emotion. In the first context, a confederate in the same room
However, James argued that first the body responds engaged in silly antics and made paper aeroplanes,
automatically to a stimulus, and then we interpret which led the volunteers to report feeling euphoric. In
our bodily responses on the basis of what is going on the second context, the confederate ripped up papers
around us: if we see a bear, we run, and a little later and stomped around the room, which led the students
our pounding heart tells us that we are afraid. to report feeling angry.
One of Stanley Schachter’s experiments dealing with Given that the arousal brought on by the drug was
‘emotional lability’ brought this idea into the laboratory unexpected, the confederate’s actions provided suf-
and gave it an attributional flavour. The key condition ficient cues to attach a label to what the volunteers
was one in which adrenalin was administered to male thought was actually an ‘emotion’.
volunteers causing them to feel aroused (an increase in

Immediate Bodily Appraisal of Subjective

stimulus response context emotion

Other person Anger

is irritating

Arousal
Adrenalin
(increase in
injected
heart rate)

Other person Euphoria

is funny
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Figure 2.5
Attributing a likely cause to an experimentally induced emotion.
Source: Based on Schachter & Singer (1962).

Styles of attribution
We all engage in attributions, but it appears that we differ in our attributional Attributional style
style. According to the eminent clinical psychologist Julian Rotter (1966), those of An individual
us who are internals tend to make internal attributions; believing we have a great (personality)
deal of personal control over our destiny – things happen because we make them predisposition to
make a certain type of
happen. Those of us who are externals tend to make external attributions; believ­
causal attribution for
ing that we have little control over what happens to us – things simply occur by behaviour.
chance, luck or the actions of powerful external agents. We can also differ in the

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Vaughan, G. (2017). Human social behaviour (custom edition). Pearson Education Australia.
Created from deakin on 2025-03-24 17:01:07.