Causal attribution as interpersonal communication

2024 Author: Miguel Ramacey | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 06:11

Surely everyone has come across a situation where, due to lack of information, misinterpretation of other people's emotions and feelings, a person misinterprets this or that act of another. Most often, these conclusions are built on the basis of their own conjectures or the prevailing opinion about a person.

History and research of the phenomenon in psychology

The founder of the term "causal attribution" in psychology was the researcher F. Haider in the middle of the twentieth century. He was the first to voice diagrams showing the reasons why a person creates an opinion about some event or person. Hyder's idea was immediately taken up by other psychologists, notably Lee Ross and George Kelly.

Kelly did a great job in understanding the causes of behavior, expanding the range of research to the grounds for attributing emotions and feelings. The more one person knows another, the more he is seized by the desire to know the motive of his actions. In the process of cognition, a person relies on data already known to him, but sometimes there are too few of them to create a complete picture of behavior andexplanation of actions. The question cannot remain unresolved, due to lack of information, a person begins to think out what he could not explain. That is, ignorance of the causes of other people's actions gives a person a reason to invent them himself, based on his own observations of the behavior of another person. This phenomenon is described in psychology as "causal attribution".

Criteria for attributing causes of behavior to Kelly.

A significant step in the development of psychology was helped by causal attribution as a phenomenon of interpersonal communication. In his theory, Kelly tried to establish what criteria a person uses when trying to explain the reasons for someone else's behavior. During the research, 3 criteria were established:

• this behavior is permanent for a person (constancy criterion);
• by such behavior a person differs from others (exclusivity criterion);
• common behavior (consensus criterion).

If a person solves a problem in the same way as the previous ones, then his behavior is permanent. When, when answering an obvious question, a person answers in a completely different way, the conclusion suggests itself about the principle of exclusivity. "In the current situation, many behave this way" - a direct proof of the usual. In search of reasons for explaining the behavior of others, a person fits into this scheme to a greater or lesser extent. It gives only general characteristics, and the set of reasons for each is individual. There remains a question that has not yet been answered.causal attribution: in which situation would a person resort to using each of the criteria?

Manifestation of causal attribution towards self and others

A feature of this phenomenon is that a person uses completely different motives of behavior towards himself. Causal attribution errors consist in the fact that a person justifies the actions of others with personal qualities. And he explains his actions by external circumstances - of course, because we are more indulgent towards ourselves. In a situation where another person has not completed the task assigned to him, we give him the title of lazy and irresponsible person. If I did not complete the task, it means that the weather, loud music behind the wall, poor he alth, etc. prevented me. The reason for this perception is that we consider our behavior to be normal, and we treat behavior that differs from ours as abnormal.