Attribution Theory
Attribution is a cognitive process that entails linking an event to its causes. Attribution is one of a variety of cognitive inferences that are included within social cognition, which is one of several theoretical models within social psychology. Social cognition has been the most dominant social psychological perspective within psychology since the 1960s, and this is evident in the popularity of research on attribution. In the mid-1970s, as much as 50 percent of the articles in major social psychology journals concerned attributional processes, in part because attribution theory is relevant to the study of person perception, event perception, attitude change, the acquisition of self-knowledge, and a host of applied topics including therapeutic interventions, close relationships, legal and medical decision making, and so forth. Although the proportion of published research that focused on this topic declined during the 1980s, attribution remains one of the more popular fields of social psychological research.
Definition
An attribution is an inference about why an event occurred. More generally, "attribution is a process that begins with social perception, progresses through a causal judgment and social inference, and ends with behavioral consequences" (Crittenden 1983, p. 426). Although most theories of and research on attribution focus on causal inference, empirical research has dealt with attributions not only of cause but also of blame and responsibility.
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