Harold Kelley (February 16, 1921, Boise, Idaho – January 29, 2003, Malibu, California) was an American social psychologist and professor of psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles. Kelley graduated in psychology from the University of California, Berkeley and obtained his Ph.D. from MIT. He moved to UCLA in 1961. He liked to consider his main contributions as being his work on the social psychology of personal relationships. However, he is perhaps best known for his contributions to attribution theory. He published important papers on attribution theory from 1967-1973 in U.S. social psychology journals. His most important collaboration was with John Thibaut, with whom he developed social exchange theory. Kelley formalized the work of Fritz Heider. He claimed that ordinary individuals and scientists often were similarly accurate in making causal inferences. Kelley's view of the attribution theory assumes that the attributions we make are, for the most part, accurate and logical. There are three main aspects of his view: 1) Consistency: "Is the behavior consistent across most people in the given situation?" 2) Distinctiveness: "Does the behavior vary across different situations?" and 3) Consensus: "Do most people engage in this behavior in this situation?"
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References
- Nisbett, Richard. (1980). Human Inference. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc. ISBN 0134451309
