Understanding Psychology (10th Ed)

 ATTRIBUTION PROCESSES: UNDERSTANDING 
THE CAUSES OF BEHAVIOR
When Barbara Washington, a new employee at the Ablex Computer Company, com-
pleted a major staffi ng project two weeks early, her boss, Yolanda, was delighted. At 
the next staff meeting, she announced how pleased she was with Barbara and explained 
that this was an example of the kind of performance she was looking for in her staff. 
The other staff members looked on resentfully, trying to fi gure out why Barbara had 
worked night and day to fi nish the project not just on time but two weeks early. She 
must be an awfully compulsive person, they decided.
At one time or another, most of us have puzzled over the reasons behind someone’s 
behavior. Perhaps it was in a situation similar to the one above, or it may have been 
in more formal circumstances, such as being a judge on a student judiciary board in 
central traits 
The major traits consid-
ered in forming impressions of others.
feL82795_ch17_576-615.indd Page 584 8/5/10 3:21 PM user-f465
feL82795_ch17_576-615.indd Page 584 8/5/10 3:21 PM user-f465
/Users/user-f465/Desktop
/Users/user-f465/Desktop

---

 
Module 52 
Attitudes and Social Cognition 
585
a cheating case. In contrast to theories of social cognition, which describe how people 
develop an overall impression of others’ personality traits,  attribution theory  seeks 
to explain how we decide, on the basis of samples of an individual’s behavior, what 
the specifi c causes of that person’s behavior are.
The general process we use to determine the causes of behavior and other social 
occurrences proceeds in several steps illustrated in Figure 4. After fi rst noticing that 
something unusual has happened—for example, tennis star Roger Federer has played 
a terrible set of tennis—we try to interpret the meaning of the event. This leads us 
to formulate an initial explanation (maybe Federer stayed up late the night before 
the match). Depending on the time available, the cognitive resources on hand (such 
as the attention we can give to the matter), and our motivation (determined in part 
by how important the event is), we may choose to accept our initial explanation or 
seek to modify it (Federer was sick, perhaps). If we have the time, cognitive resources, 
and motivation, the event triggers deliberate problem solving as we seek a fuller 
explanation. During the problem formulation and resolution stage, we may try out 
several possibilities before we reach a fi nal explanation that seems satisfactory to us 
(Malle, 2004; Brown, 2006). 
In seeking an explanation for behavior, we must answer one central question: Is 
the cause situational or dispositional?  Situational causes  are those brought about by 
something in the environment. For instance, someone who knocks over a quart of 
milk and then cleans it up probably does the cleaning not because he or she is nec-
essarily a neat person but because the situation requires it. In contrast, a person who 
spends hours shining the kitchen fl oor probably does so because he or she is a neat