Question

According to The Attribution Theory, how do perceivers try to determine the target person's behaviors?

Answer 1

Attribution theory suggests that people have a tendency to search for the causes of their behaviour and others behaviour. The perceivers take an active role to ascribe meaning to the actions of others or themselves. They expain actions in two ways:

• Dispositionally: This means that they explain it by the person's behaviour or personality. For e.g. you may find yoursef oversimplifing an Uber driver's occasional bad behavior to his bad temperament.
  • Self-serving bias: Internal or dispositional aspects are used to explain successes and external circumstances for failures.
  • Defensive attribution hypothesis: Individuals hold on to a set of beliefs and justify succeses or failures. For eg. the just-world hypothesis - Good things happen to good people.
• Situationally: This means that they explain it by the context or situation. This is an external attribution technique by which the person explains the other person or the target's behaviour by the context of the situation. For eg. Rapists often get an explanation for their actions by attribution of blame to their victims that they were there at the wrong time, dressed provocatively.
• Cognitive structures: This is through the inferential sets, schemas and frames of the person.