An important part of social cognition is Causality- the factors that cause events or behaviours to happen. Attribution is the process people use to work out what caused an event or behaviour. The conditions that affect how we attribute causes is called Attribution theory. The main factors in attributing causes are Dispositional Attribution- the behaviour is caused by a characteristic of that person, and Situational Attribution- the behaviour is caused by their physical or social environment. Internal biases also affect how we attribute blame to them and which factors we concentrate more closely on.
The main psychologist involved in attribution theories is Kelley, who developed two different and complementary theories. Kelley’s first theory is the Co-Variation model, which is used for explaining the behaviour of people we know. It is based on what we know about the persons previous behaviour, and how it compares to other peoples behaviour. The Co-Variation Model According to Kelley, we take three types of information into account when we make attributions. The results of this information decides if we attribute the behaviour to the person, the situation, or both. For each of the pieces of information, use the example of a person scared of a particular dog.
The first piece of information is Consensus. This is the amount that other people have the same behaviour as the person . If lots of people have the same behaviour (e.g. are scared of the same dog) consensus is high. If a very small amount of people have the same behaviour, consensus is low. The second piece of information is Consistency. This is the amount the behaviour has happened in the past. If the persons behaviour is their usual response (e.g. if they have always been afraid of that dog) consistency is high. If they have never been afraid of it before, consistency is low.
The third piece of information is distinctiveness. This is how similarly the person behaves towards stimuli that are similar. If the person does not behave in the same way towards a similar stimulus (e.g. they are not afraid of other dogs) distinctiveness is high. If they behave in the same way (e.g. they are afraid of all other dogs) distinctiveness is low. Kelley said that if consensus was low, consistency was high, and distinctiveness was low, (LHL) we would attribute the behaviour to the person. For example, if person A had always been afraid of all dogs, and no-one else they knew was afraid of dogs, we would attribute their fear to them being timid or easily scared.
However if consensus, consistency and distinctiveness were all high (HHH), we would attribute the behaviour to the entity. For example, if person B was afraid of one particular dog, but no others, and many other people were afraid of this dog, we would attribute that to the dog having an aggressive temperament. The last combination is if consensus is low, consistency is low, and distinctiveness is high(LLH). This behaviour would be attributed to a particular set of circumstances. For example if person C was afraid of only one dog, and had never been before, and no-one else was afraid of this dog. An explanation of this would be that the dog was usually calm but had recently been aggressive to person C.
This Co-Variation theory has been tested in experiments, and showed that when the three pieces of information are manipulated, people make the attributions predicted by Kelley. However, despite giving accurate results, there are problems with the theory. Garland et al showed thatpeople use other information such as personality and context, instead of the information Kelley used. One study found that people would only use the consensus, consistency, and distinctiveness information when no information about the situation or context was available. The theory is also very cognitively expensive as it takes a lot of effort to process the consensus, consistency and distinctiveness, even when they are available to use. Due to our tendency to act as “cognitive misers” we need a quicker way of processing the information.