Everyone, at some point, interprets the behavior, our behavior and that of others. A psychological theory that explains how we interpret behavior is the theory of causal attribution, this theory, which belongs to social psychology, was developed primarily by Heider, who defined it as a method of evaluating how people perceive their own behavior and that of others.
Heider’s theory of causal attribution attempts to analyze how we explain the behavior and events of people’s lives; in other words, how we make behavioral assignments. For Heider, we tend to attribute the behavior of others to one of two possible causes: an internal cause (personality traits, intelligence, motivation, etc. ) or an external cause (luck, situation, actions of others).
- Heider’s attribution theory distinguishes only internal and external attributions; Bertrand Weiner subsequently added two other factors to the theory; Heider’s assignments were designated as a control locus.
- To which he added stability and control; each of these factors is explained below:.
Causal assignments, as we have seen, can be made by conduct performed by yourself or others; In turn, these assignments can have an internal or external locus, can be stable or unstable, and controllability can be internal or external. The different combinations that arise are those that indicate motivation and self-esteem.
For example, if a young man wins a running competition it is because he has trained a lot and prepared for it, this mission is internal and refers to another person, but if the youth victory is attributed to the lack of competitiveness, to the fact that the other participants were not prepared, then it would be an external mission.
The internal attributes of the successes to which stability and controllability are attributed are the most positive, these kinds of tasks increase self-esteem and, at the same time, motivation, on the contrary, if these same responsibilities are attributed to failures, self-esteem is reduced, as well as motivation.
The same person can make different causal assignments for similar events, just as different people can make different causal assignments for the same event, for example, if for some they do not pass a test, it would be due to lack of capacity (internal and stable cause), for others it would result from the difficulty of the test (external and unstable cause) These variations, in addition to influencing self-esteem and motivation , also have a fundamental influence on expectations.
Depending on how we interpret the behaviors of others, we will think about it one way or another, but these assignments are neither perfect nor objective. On many occasions we make mistakes in interpreting behaviors, which is why the theory of causal attribution has given rise to other areas of related research, some of which are the theory of fundamental attribution error, cognitive dissonance and obedience.
When interpreting behaviors we use heuristics and prejudices that lead us to bad assignments, in many cases these assignments are motivated by our previous beliefs, if the interpretations we made were different would generate a cognitive dissonance that we tend to avoid. , causal attributions will influence our relationship with the people whose behaviors we evaluate, in this way we will have more attention to those who have better responsibilities than those who leave something to be desired: we will obey more and take their opinions. more into account.