I’ve been reading “Social Psychology: A Very Short Introduction” by Richard Crisp, and learned a new concept today: attribution theory. Attribution is what we do as humans to make sense of the world. Specifically in the social universe, it’s how we attribute cause to the effects of people’s behaviors. For instance, if we see a person staring at us in a train, we’ll immediately start trying to infer their thoughts and motives. Do they like me? Do I have something on my face? We are designed to make sense of our world and we’ll see how this is both a blessing and a curse.

Before moving forward, an important distinction: interpreting our social universe is fundamentally different from interpreting the physical in that physical objects don’t change their properties depending on the situation - but people do. Their personalities may change depending if they’re at work or at home for example. Factoring in the context when interpreting their behavior is necessary when trying to attribute the cause of someone’s behavior, and this is what attribution theory tackles.

Behavior can derive from an internal or external cause. Internal is split between disposition, personality and mood whereas external can range from their situation, luck or even the influence of other people. Harold Kelly has a model for determining whether the cause of a behavior is internal or external and it’s called the co-variational model. This model breaks down a behavior by analyzing the context in three categories: consensus, consistency and distinctiveness. For instance, let’s say I’m wearing a red wig. How do we know if I’m wearing that red wig because of an internal cause or an external one?

Consensus:

• if everybody else is wearing a red wig, then it’s probably external. It’s red wig day.

Consistency:

• if this is my first time wearing a red wig, that leans towards external. Imagine if I wore it everyday for years no matter the day, it’d be a lot more believable that some internal cause is driving me to wear the red wig.

Distinctiveness:

• am I just wearing the red wig to work? Or am I also wearing it at home? Depending on what situations I wear the red wig will determine the internal/ external property of the behavior’s cause. The more distinct, the more likely to be external.

Let’s be honest though, we’re definitely not this rational when making judgments on other people’s behaviors. Usually there’s some constraint like time pressure that forces us to go through a different, more irrational process to get out a result. Remember, we are wired to interpret our social universe as soon as information starts coming in. This is where it starts to get interesting because cognitive biases start playing a large role:

Fundamental attribution bias (FA bias)

• People tend to classify others’ behaviors as dispositional and not situational (dispositional and situational are just fancy words for internal and external).

Interestingly enough, people attribute their own behaviors in the exact opposite way. We attribute most of our behaviors as situational. In fact, look at yourself in the mirror to see the opposite be true. Suddenly, even the smallest things you will start attributing to disposition rather than situational. This is explained by perceptual salience, the notion that our attention is caught by whatever’s most noticeable in the scene before us and that’s where we attribute causality. Essentially, from our perspective, the situation/ the world is what’s most noticeable from our perspective, hence why we can attribute cause to the situation so easily. However, when we see someone else be angry, we only see them, not the 4 diapers they had to change between 4 - 8 AM.

Another fun bias the book describes is self-serving bias, the survival instinct that lets us warp our attributions to boost our own self-esteem and self-worth. I do a great job at work and it was all me. I do a terrible job and it’s because the work environment is not conducive. Both causes are plausible in both scenarios, but we’re probably not computing the results at the time in a rational manner and are not to be trusted.

I’ll stop there for now, but I highly recommend the book. Like the title says, it introduces us to the world of social psychology, but I will add it flows quite well. The content also ties concepts back to reality in order to illustrate the pragmatic application of these concepts.