Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

How We Judge Others: The Attribution Of Responsibility, Brad B. Richardson

Student Work

Attribution theory is concerned with the process by which people infer causation from "parts of the relatively stable environment" (Heider, 1958:297). This process is a function of the need to. control the environment through explanation and prediction similar to the way scientists attempt descriptions that render predictions. This analogy has also been drawn by Kelley (1967), who has concluded that the way in which causal attributions are made is similar to the way data is analysed by means of the analysis of variance procedure. Another example of the parallel between the scientific method and attribution processes has been made by …