Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [282]
Fritz Heider, an Austrian psychologist, had suggested the concept of attribution as early as 1927, but little notice was taken of it for many years. In 1958, Heider, who had long since immigrated to the United States, broadened the concept, proposing in his Psychology of Interpersonal Relations that our perceptions of causality affect our social behavior, and that we respond not to actual stimuli but to what we think caused them. An example: If a wife is trying to annoy her husband by not talking to him, he may think either that she is worried or that he has done something to offend her, and his actions will depend not on the real reason for her behavior but on what he attributes it to.57 Heider also made a valuable distinction between those attributions which point toward external causes and those which point toward internal ones. This preceded by eight years Julian Rotter’s important work on the attribution of internal versus external locus of control as a key personality trait.
Psychologists found Heider’s ideas exciting, since knowledge of the factors that lead people to make attributions would greatly increase the predictability of human behavior. Interest in attribution grew throughout the 1960s, and by the 1970s it had become one of the hot topics in social psychology.
But more a topic than a theory; indeed, it was a mass of small theories, each a reworking in attributional terms of some previous explanation of a sociopsychological phenomenon.58 Cognitive dissonance was reinterpreted as the self-attributing of one’s behavior to what one supposed one’s beliefs and feelings must be. (If circumstances compel me to behave badly toward someone, I tell myself that he deserves it and attribute my behavior to my perception of his “real” nature.) The foot-in-the-door phenomenon was similarly explained anew: if I give a little to a fund raiser the first time, and therefore give more a second time, it is because I attribute the first donation to my being a good and kindly person. And so on. Large areas of the territory of social psychology were invaded and laid claim to by the attributionists.59
More important than the reinterpretation of previous findings was the multitude of new discoveries resulting from attribution research. A few notable examples:60
—Lee Ross and two colleagues asked pairs of student volunteers to play a “quiz show game.” One was appointed questioner, the other contestant. Questioners were asked to make up ten fairly difficult questions to which they knew the answers, then pose them to the contestants. (Contestants averaged about six correct answers.) Afterward, all participants were asked to rate one another’s “general knowledge.” Nearly all the contestants said they considered questioners more knowledgeable than themselves; so did impartial observers of the experiment. Even though they knew that questioners had asked questions they knew the answers to, they attributed superior general knowledge to them because of the role they had played.
—Investigators discovered that we commonly attribute the behavior of highly noticeable, different-looking, or strikingly dressed people to inherent qualities, and the behavior of forgettable or ordinary-looking people to external (situational) forces.
—People’s reactions to the poor, alcoholics, accident victims, rape victims, and other unfortunates were explained in terms of the “just world hypothesis”—the need to believe that the world is orderly and just, and that it rewards us according to our deserts. This leads to the attribution of victims’ misfortunes to