Causal attribution - what is it. Causal attribution - what is it in psychology and communication

Surely everyone has encountered a situation where, due to a lack of information, misinterpretation of other people's emotions and feelings, a person misevaluates one or another action of another. Most often, these conclusions are based on one’s own conjectures or existing opinions about a person.

History and research of the phenomenon in psychology

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

Kelly did a great deal of work in understanding the causes of behavior, expanding the range of research to the basis of attribution. The more one person gets to know another, the more he is seized by the desire to find out the motive of his actions. In the process of cognition, a person relies on data already known to him, but sometimes there is too little of it to create a holistic picture of behavior and explain actions. The question cannot remain unresolved; due to a lack of information, a person begins to think out what he could not explain. That is, ignorance of the reasons for other people’s actions gives a person a reason to invent them himself, based on his own observations of the behavior of another person. described in psychology as “causal attribution.”

Criteria for attributing causes of behavior to Kelly.

Causal attribution as a phenomenon helped make a significant step. 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 constant for a person (constancy criterion);

such behavior distinguishes a person from others (criterion of exclusivity);

normality of 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 about the principle of exclusivity suggests itself. “In the current situation, many people behave this way” is direct evidence of commonality. In searching for reasons to explain other people's behavior, a person more or less fits into this scheme. She only gives general characteristics, and the set of reasons is individual for everyone. The question remains, which causal attribution has not yet been able to answer: in what situation will a person resort to using each of the criteria?

Manifestation of causal attributions in relation to oneself and others

The peculiarity of this phenomenon is that a person applies completely different motives of behavior towards himself. Errors of causal attribution consist in the fact that a person justifies other people's actions with personal qualities. And he explains his actions by external circumstances - of course, because we are more lenient towards ourselves. In a situation where another person has not completed the task assigned to him, we give him the title of a lazy and irresponsible person. If I didn’t complete the task, it means that the weather, loud music outside the wall, etc. interfered with me. The reason for this idea is that we consider our behavior to be normal, and we interpret behavior that differs from ours as abnormal.

Every day we come across many people. We don’t just pass by, but begin to think about them: what they say, how they look, we observe their behavior.

And often it seems to us that we not only see how a person looks - whether he is fat or thin, tall or short, what color his eyes are, his hair, how he is dressed - but also such things as whether he is smart or stupid, respectable or No.

We even subconsciously determine his mood, social status and we assume that we have already compiled a description of the person. However, this is not true. All these actions of ours have their own name, and in psychology this phenomenon is called attribution.

Meaning

Let's figure it out: what is attribution? Attribution is a process where people, given a small amount of information, make conclusions about the reasons for a person’s behavior or events that occurred. But this doesn't always apply to other people. Most often, attribution is directed toward oneself, when a person tries to justify or explain his actions by referring to various factors.

The concept and essence of attribution is to take personal action. Those qualities of an individual that are characterized are excluded from the limits of perception - in fact, they even seem to not exist. That is, we can give another definition of attribution - this is the characteristic that they try to create through intuition and some inferences. And, as a rule, attributing certain qualities to one or another individual does not always turn out to be correct.

Causal attribution is aimed at explaining the motives of behavior – both one’s own and others’. It happens that you need to analyze and predict the behavior of a person, but there is not enough data for this. Therefore, the reasons and motives that could guide the object of attention are often guessed at.

This approach also applies to social groups, when they are characterized, but there are no obvious motives for their behavior in the field of perception. Psychologists call this case group attribution. Group attribution also occurs when a group of individuals tries to explain their positive aspects internal factors, and for the out-group, external factors are indicated as the cause. Conversely, they attribute their negative aspects to external factors, in another group they indicate the reason negative points internal factors.

Attribution theory states that a person analyzes the behavior of other people depending on the reasons that he himself has intuitively identified. According to the theory, causal attribution is divided into two types:

• External.
• Internal.

The external type of attribution is the search for the causes of behavior among factors that do not depend on a person, that is, external factors. And internal (internal) is an explanation of the reasons for behavior based on one’s own psychological state.

Attribution theory implies a certain order of human actions:

• Observation of an object and its behavior in a certain situation.
• Based on assessments and personal perception, draw a conclusion from observing the object.
• Using this conclusion and the behavior of the object, attribute psychological patterns of behavior to it.

The concept and essence of attribution implies speculating about the reasons for people’s behavior, but this does not always correspond to reality. To be more precise, more often than not, the theory of causal attribution is not true.

Varieties

Attribution in psychology is divided into three types. It is worth considering the types of attribution in more detail.

• Personal attribution means that a person is looking for the culprit of a particular situation. More often than not, the cause is a specific person.
• Comprehensive - in this case, a person is not interested in specific culprits; he is looking for the reasons for what is happening in external factors.
• Stimulus - a person blames an inanimate object. This happens more often if he himself is to blame. For example: the glass broke because it was standing on the very edge of the table.

The causal attribution effect helped reveal some facts. If an individual has to explain the good fortune of a stranger or his own personal problems, then incentive attribution is used.

But if there is a need to analyze the success of the individual himself and the failure of an outsider, then personal attribution is used. This indicates a peculiarity of the psychology of any person - we treat ourselves much more loyally than others. Such examples of attribution very clearly prove this fact.

Also of interest is the fact that usually, when talking about success, a person indicates himself as the main reason. But in unsuccessful business, circumstances are always to blame. The individual believes that he has achieved everything because he is very smart and hardworking, and if any failure occurs, then the reason for this was factors beyond the control of the individual.

However, if a person talks about the successes of another person, then everything is the opposite. The other one was lucky because he is a suck-up, a weasel, and is on good terms with his bosses. But he is unlucky because he is lazy and not smart enough.

Social causal attribution is very clearly visible among organizational leaders when they need to characterize subordinates. There are long-standing biases at play here, and they are often formulaic. If management is asked to tell about the reason for an ineffective result, then the causal factor will always be internal. Always and everywhere, ordinary workers will be to blame for the decline in production.

And few will point out that the reason for the decline in production was insufficient funding or improper organization of labor. In such cases, there is a tendency to underestimate situational factors and greatly overestimate the capabilities of individual ones.

It can also be noted that managers most often do not take responsibility for any failures. When asked why they are so ineffective in their place, they will point to low financial support as the reason, but not their own oversight. However, if we're talking about about success, then management, as a rule, takes full credit for this achievement.

Misjudgment

When making judgments, a person very often makes mistakes. This is due to the fact that he usually underestimates external factors and the influence of the situation, but overestimates the personal capabilities of another individual.

This case is called the fundamental attribution error. This happens when the reasons are the same for both internal and external factors. The individual cannot make up his mind and a fundamental error occurs.

By indicating consequences and causes, we draw different conclusions. Also, our conclusions and explanations of reasons will be different depending on whether we like the other person or not.

• If an individual achieves success, then he will indicate his own qualities as the reason.
• The situation will be to blame for the individual's failure.

The phenomenon of causal attribution can be traced in the analysis of the behavior of a nice person and a not so nice one. A person makes a significant mistake when he finds reasons where he was looking for them. This means that if a person has already tuned in to a certain result, he will find it everywhere. If we intend to justify a person's actions, we will always find reasons to justify him.

And vice versa, if we decide to condemn someone, we will definitely condemn them by finding an appropriate reason. At the same time, only people with a developed sense of responsibility will attribute responsibility. They tend to imagine themselves in the shoes of others, understand the feelings of strangers and try on other people's behavior patterns.

Attribution is conjecture when analyzing someone's actions when there is a lack of information. In other words, we want to obtain data about our colleagues, interlocutors, or simply about a group of people based on some data that we have. If this data is not enough, then this occurs psychological phenomenon, as attribution. It can both reflect reality and distort it. This is very important to consider.

Casual attribution is a phenomenon of perception of a person by a person, which consists in explaining, attributing the reasons for the actions of this very perceived person in the condition of a lack of information about the real reasons for such an action.

So, you come to work, and your colleague compliments you right from the door. You don't know the real reasons why he did this. And a variety of “explanations” may pop up in your head:

• “I had a fight with my girlfriend and now I’m ready to hit on me”;
• “I really put on my makeup today”;
• “He wants to suck up and go on vacation, dumping extra work on me.”

So, in everyday life, we come across examples of casual attribution. Surprisingly, in fact, a colleague may simply have good mood and he is ready to shower the whole world with compliments.

This concept was formed in Western social psychology, and is most fully revealed in the theory of attribution. The main questions that were revealed during the creation of this theory concerned the mechanisms and factors by which ordinary person explains, first of all, to himself the cause-and-effect relationships of the events in which he participates or witnesses, as well as how he explains his personal behavior.

Now the concept has expanded significantly. Casual attribution in psychology is the attribution of different motives and qualities to the person we encounter in life. Sometimes these “conclusions” of ours may be unconscious.

However, how do we explain to ourselves the behavior of a stranger if, as was said earlier, we do not know his real motives? Naturally, we ourselves have personal experience, on the basis of which we derive variants of existing motives. In addition, the society in which we live offers or even imposes familiar schemes for explanation.

So, while waiting for a late friend, we will catch ourselves wondering if something happened to her child, because for ourselves at this stage The most important thing in life is our baby. And we can only be late without calling if something bad happens to the baby.

But the blaring radio receiver, of course, will convince us that our friend is stuck in those very terrible traffic jams in the city center.

Attribution Types

• personal (the reason is attributed to the person who performs the action);
• object or stimulus (the reason is attributed to the object to which the activity is directed);
• circumstantial or situational (the cause is attributed to independent circumstances).

People who have the most developed personal attribution always attribute events that happened to the “culprit.” “He got a promotion. Of course, he’s a suck-up.” “Is your son’s family having financial problems again? Naturally, the daughter-in-law doesn’t know how to plan a budget at all.” “I wasn’t hired? Yes, these leaders are all so stupid - they only pay attention to appearance.”

One cannot help but recall examples of self-flagellation. Let's say the guy promised to call back this morning, but you never received a call. And here there may be options when you may seem to be this “culprit” to yourself: “I am guilty. As always, I stuffed myself too much.” Or: “It’s always like this! I'm not lucky." Similar cases“slipping” into personal attribution and blaming oneself can significantly affect not only self-esteem, but even mental state human and cause depression, neuroses and suicidal thoughts. Remember that attribution is associated precisely with “thinking out” the reasons for what is happening. And they do not always (and more often - never) coincide with actual motives. Because the effect in question, as mentioned earlier, always occurs in situations of lack of real information. Therefore, if you find yourself thinking that you too often blame yourself for all the deadly sins, perhaps you should talk about it with a psychologist.

Object or stimulus causal attribution, on the contrary, blames the object itself for what happened. “It’s not my fault. The glass fell and broke on its own,” he cries. small child. However, stimulus attribution is not always so touchingly innocent. Let's look at situations of family or child violence when real reasons are repressed or not realized. “He started it himself,” say several ten-year-old children who beat a seven-year-old child until he suffered a concussion. “He began to insult me,” says the tyrant father who crippled his son. “Yes, she dressed like a prostitute herself,” says the grandmother of the teenage rapist.

In a word, the object itself provoked the action on itself. Often, this happens in situations of uncontrolled aggression. And even if your situation does not involve such critical cases, the preference to explain an action in terms of object attribution may be caused by an internal need to justify oneself. Think about whether you had to make excuses all the time in early childhood and whether this hurt you? If you remember such cases, do not forget to work through such childhood situations with your psychologist.

If a person has a detailed causal attribution, then the cause of everything is called circumstances, external factors, which, by and large, are not directly related to the subject or object of the activity. “Just look at the movies and games these days – it’s all violence,” says the mother of a man convicted of hooliganism. And a patient with alcoholism swears for the hundredth time that he had no intention of drinking yesterday, it was just “the way the stars aligned,” and the reduced atmospheric pressure led to the need for migraine therapy.

Errors of perception

Although some people tend to make one type of attribution, most people attribute motive and cause using different types of phenomena. So, if we are faced with our own failures and the successes of other people, then we tend to explain this by circumstances. But if it’s the other way around, then we consider our achievements and other people’s failures from the position of personal attribution.

In addition, participants in events more often use detailed attribution, and observers use personal attribution.

Interesting examples of social casual attribution that have been transferred to various business trainings. Thus, if you ask managers to name the reasons for the crisis situation in which the company finds itself, then they almost always name issues associated with poor skills or insufficient diligence of the employees of this company. In case of successful functioning, the credit is attributed to oneself. In both cases, there is a bias towards personal attribution. At the same time, external factors are almost never mentioned, although they are often real components of the demand for this type of activity as a whole.

But if the task was set to describe why they were insolvent leaders, then the reasons suggested by a detailed attribution came first.

All of the above and many other studies have led to the establishment
mechanisms of casual attribution. The conclusions were:

• there are systemic differences in explaining one’s behavior and the actions of other people;
• own subjective factors deviate the substitution process from logical rules;
• the activity of a person who received an unsatisfactory result is explained through the influence external environment, and satisfactory - by the influence of internal factors.

Research objectives and possibilities of using the phenomenon of casual attribution

As mentioned earlier, the first studies concerned social causal attribution. The study of this phenomenon made it possible to establish the degree of responsibility that each member of the team assumed for their joint activities. And also evaluate and correlate this with the real contribution to the work for possible forecasts prospects and success of employees.

However, now the theory of attribution is used within the framework of pedagogical, developmental, and sports psychology. And attribution errors help practicing psychologists pay attention to some life attitudes and possible problems.

In addition, obvious biases towards one or another type of attribution may indicate unprocessed children’s fears, which, in turn, can lead to various psychological characteristics behavior or, even worse, personal problems. So, if you are interested in something or some point in the article is not completely clear to you, do not hesitate to talk about it with a psychologist.

Lapshun Galina Nikolaevna, Master of Psychology, psychologist I category

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Causal attribution: This is the process of attributing to another person the reasons for his behavior when information about these reasons is absent. Attribution is carried out either on the basis of the similarity of the behavior of the perceived person with some other model that existed in the past experience of the subject of perception, or on the basis of an analysis of one’s own motives assumed in a similar situation.

The measure and degree of attribution depend on:

Degrees of uniqueness or typicality of an action

The degree of its social « desirability" or "undesirability". Experiments (John, Davis, Gergen): subjects listened to interviews of people allegedly selected to be astronauts and submariners. At the same time, the ideal astronaut was described as an introvert, and the submariner was described as an extrovert. Then they were given a recording of interviews with people who were supposedly going to become submariners and astronauts and asked to determine the type of profession. Half of the subjects in the interviews clearly showed traits of introversion and extraversion - the subjects accurately identified them. In the other half of the subjects, the submariners demonstrated introversion in the interview, and the astronauts demonstrated extroversion. There were no clear answers. Conclusion : Behavior that deviates from role requirements requires additional behavior.

G. Kelly: Causal attribution theory:

1. covariation theory

With repeated observation in a person, 3 criteria are triggered:

Similarities (does everyone behave like this).

Differences (do they always behave this way),

Coincidences (does everyone always behave this way).

In various cases elected different type attribution

- personal attribution (the reason is attributed personally to the person committing the act),

- stimulus attribution (the reason is attributed to the object to which the action is directed),

- circumstantial attribution (the reason for what is happening is attributed to circumstances). It was found that the observer more often uses personal attribution, and the participant is more inclined to explain what is happening by circumstances. This feature is clearly manifested when attributing reasons for success and failure: the participant in the action “blames” the failure primarily on the circumstances, while the observer “blames” the failure primarily on the performer himself.

2. configuration theory(one single observation).

Basic principles :

Strengthening (priority is given to the reason that encounters an obstacle: the person clearly takes risks, commits an action, overcoming difficulties, etc.).

- depreciation (Thibault and Rickert experiment : People were asked to watch excerpts of the “obsequious behavior” of two people—one with a high status and one with a low—to explain the reasons for this behavior. For low status was chosen and internal cause(powerlessness in life) and external (desire for help), and for high status- only internal (that’s the way he is), since his status is high and people believed that he definitely couldn’t need help. Conclusion: a reason that has an alternative is discarded).

Systemic distortion (typical attribution errors).

The problem of attribution of responsibility occupies a special place. Hypothesis : the more serious the act, the more responsibility lies on the individual, and not on the circumstances. Experiment: with a car on a hill (attribution of liability depending on the severity of the damage caused).

Attribution errors :

Fundamental error (overestimation of personal characteristics compared to situational ones)

5 Reasons for a Fundamental Error :

The idea of ​​false agreement (the other person's views are similar to mine).

We attribute to the personality what should be attributed to the role.

Facts become more important than reasoning about them.

Illusory correlations (arbitrary connection of completely unrelated phenomena).

We don't take into account what didn't happen.

The fundamental attribution error is not absolute because the participant and observer attribute causes differently. Why?

1. They have different levels awareness.

2. They have different angles of view, they have different perceptual focus. Storms experiment : a conversation between two people was filmed and then shown to them - when interpreting their behavior after the conversation and after viewing the film, the interpretation of their behavior changed. And when watching the film, the interpretation coincided with the interpretation of the real observer of this conversation. But for real observers of the conversation, everything was the other way around - before viewing the film, they showed an attribution error, and after viewing the film, they “came closer” in perception to the participants in the conversation.

Motivational error (recognized by motivational processes, defenses).

Types:

1. reduction of motivation for positive self-esteem:

Counter-defensive attribution (if a person knows that his actions will be critically evaluated, he will attribute success to circumstances and failure to himself).

Self-interference (on the way to achieving a goal, a person creates obstacles for himself, i.e. he makes excuses in advance for failure).

2. motivation corresponding to the norm (false similarity).

3. need for stability, security:

Faith in a just world

Illusion of control (attributing more control to oneself than one actually has).

Weiner: reasons for motivational error:

Stable - unstable, internal - external, controlled - uncontrolled.

Depending on a person's motivation, there may be a different set of reasons. The choice of each combination is determined by different motivations: either to justify weakness, or to assert oneself, i.e. motivation to achieve or against achievement. Usually, if explained your own success (failure)), That success due to personal reasons and failure– situational, and if someone else’s success (failure) is explained, then the opposite is true. However, there is also influence of self-esteem: If a person has low self-esteem, then it is possible to attribute it to luck and circumstances. Moreover, attribution of internal or external reasons depends on status perceived. Thibault and Rickert experiment with high-status and low-status people who, having listened to a speech about the need for donation, both went to donate blood, but in the case of a high-status person, such a decision was attributed to his personality, and in the case of a low-status person, to the success of the speech.

Nikolukina's research : a study group was considered - participants were asked to rank the group according to academic performance, and then each participant was given information that the student who, according to his own classification, was “smarter” received 2, and the student who was “stupid” received 5. In this case, the reasons were situational. And if “adequate” information was provided (i.e., vice versa), then the reasons were attributed to the individual.

Effects:

Installation effect plays a significant role in forming the first impression of a stranger, which was revealed in experiments A. A. Bodaleva. Two groups of students were shown a photograph of the same person (the criminal was a prominent scientist). After this, each group was asked to make a verbal portrait of the photographed person. The portrait turned out appropriate.

Experiments on the halo effect

- The assessments of two groups of children given by the subject of perception were recorded: “favorite” and “unloved” children. Although the “favorite” (in this case, more attractive) children made (intentional) errors in performing the task, and the “unfavorite” children performed it correctly, the perceiver attributed positive ratings“loved”, and negative ones - “unloved”. This is consistent with the correspondence theory that people generally reason in this way: « bad person has bad traits, " good man has good traits." Conclusion: attribution of causes of behavior and characteristics is carried out according to the same model: bad people bad deeds are always attributed, and good deeds are always attributed to good ones.

- the transfer of physically attractive traits to psychological characteristics Perceived Person: A group of men were shown photographs of beautiful, ordinary, and decidedly ugly women and asked to comment on their features. Only the beautiful were endowed with such traits as strong, balanced, amiable and even caring and attentive. The halo effect expresses a tendency to darken certain characteristics and highlight others, and plays the role of a kind of filter when “reading” a communication partner.

The effect of “primacy and novelty” - concerns the significance of a certain order of presentation of information about a person for drawing up an idea about him: information presented earlier is considered as “primary”, and information presented late as “new”. Experiment : Four groups of students were presented with a stranger who had to be described in terms of his personality traits and was described as: extrovert; introvert; first that he is an extrovert, and then that he is an introvert; the same thing, but in reverse order. In the first two groups no problems with such a description arose. In groups 3 and 4, impressions of the stranger exactly corresponded to the order in which the information was presented: the one presented earlier prevailed. This effect is called "primacy effect" and has been recorded in cases where it is perceived stranger. On the contrary, in situations of perception of a familiar person, it acts "novelty effect", which lies in the fact that the latter, i.e. newer information turns out to be the most significant. However, there is no clear answer to the question of which method of presenting information about another person is optimal.

Causal attribution.

Causal attribution(English attribute - to attribute, to endow) - the subject’s interpretation of his perception of the reasons and motives of the behavior of other people, obtained on the basis of direct observation, analysis of performance results and other things by attributing to an individual, a group of people properties, characteristics that were not included in the field of perception and how would be conjectured by them.

Each of the participants in the interaction, assessing the other, strives to build a certain system of interpretation of his behavior, in particular its reasons. In everyday life, people often do not know the real reasons for another person’s behavior or do not know them enough. In conditions of a lack of information, they begin to attribute to each other both the reasons for behavior and sometimes the patterns of behavior themselves or some more general characteristics. Attribution is carried out either on the basis of the similarity of the behavior of the perceived person with some other model that existed in the past experience of the subject of perception, or on the basis of an analysis of one’s own motives assumed in a similar situation (in this case, the identification mechanism may operate). But, one way or another, a whole system of methods for such attribution (attribution) arises. Thus, the interpretation of one’s own and others’ behavior through attribution (reasons, motives, feelings, etc.) is an integral part of interpersonal perception and cognition.

A special branch of social psychology, called causal attribution, analyzes precisely these processes (F. Heider, G. Kelly, E. Jones, K. Davis, D. Kennose, R. Nisbet, L. Strickland). If at first the study of attribution was only about attributing reasons for the behavior of another person, then later they began to study ways of attributing a wider class of characteristics: intentions, feelings, personality traits. The phenomenon of attribution itself arises when a person has a deficit of information about another person: it is necessary to replace it with the process of attribution.

The measure and degree of attribution in the process of interpersonal perception depends on two indicators, namely on the degree:

uniqueness or typicality of an act (this refers to the fact that typical behavior is behavior prescribed by role models, and therefore it is easier to interpret unambiguously; on the contrary, unique behavior allows for many different interpretations and, therefore, gives scope for attributing its causes and characteristics);

its social desirability or undesirability (socially “desirable” is understood as behavior that corresponds to social and cultural norms and therefore is relatively easily and unambiguously explained; however, when such norms are violated, the range possible explanations expands significantly).

The structure of the causal attribution process

The following aspects of interest to attribution researchers are highlighted: characteristics of the subject of perception (observer), characteristics of the object and the situation of perception.

An interesting attempt to construct a theory of causal attribution belongs to G. Kelly. He showed how a person searches for reasons to explain the behavior of another person. IN general view The answer is this: every person has some a priori causal beliefs and causal expectations.

A causal schema is a kind of general concept this person O possible interactions various reasons, about what actions, in principle, these causes produce. It is built on three principles:

§ the principle of devaluation, when the role main reason events are underestimated due to overestimation of other reasons;

§ the principle of amplification, when the role is exaggerated specific reason in the event;

§ the principle of systematic distortion, when there are constant deviations from the rules of formal logic when explaining the causes of people’s behavior Kelly G. The process of causal attribution // Modern foreign social psychology. Texts. M., 1984 C 146..

In other words, every person has a system of causality schemes, and every time the search for reasons that explain “other people’s” behavior, one way or another, fits into one of these existing schemes. The repertoire of causal schemas that each personality possesses is quite extensive. The question is which causal scheme will work in each particular case.

In experiments it was found that various people demonstrate predominantly completely different types of attribution, that is, varying degrees the “correctness” of the attributed reasons. In order to determine the degree of this correctness, three categories are introduced: 1) similarity - agreement with the opinions of other people; 2) differences - differences from the opinions of other people; 3) correspondence - the constancy of the action of the cause in time and space.

The exact relationships have been established in which specific combinations of manifestations of each of the three criteria should give a personal, stimulus or circumstantial attribution. In one of the experiments, a special “key” was proposed, with which the test subjects’ answers should be compared each time: if the answer coincides with the optimum given in the “key,” then the reason was assigned correctly; if a discrepancy is observed, it is possible to establish what kind of “shifts” are characteristic of each person in the choice of the reasons predominantly attributed to them. Comparisons of the test subjects' answers with the proposed standards helped to establish at the experimental level the truth that people do not always attribute a cause “correctly,” even from the point of view of very simplified criteria.

G. Kelly revealed that depending on whether the subject of perception himself is a participant in an event or an observer, he can preferentially choose one of three types of attribution:

personal attribution, when the reason is attributed personally to the person committing the act;

object attribution, when the cause is attributed to the object to which the action is directed;

circumstantial attribution, when the cause of what is happening is attributed to circumstances.

It was found that the observer more often uses personal attribution, and the participant is more inclined to explain what is happening by circumstances. This feature is clearly manifested when attributing reasons for success and failure: the participant in the action “blames” the failure primarily on the circumstances, while the observer “blames” the failure primarily on the performer himself. The general pattern is that, as the event becomes more significant, subjects tend to move from circumstantial and objective attribution to personal attribution (that is, to look for the cause of what happened in the conscious actions of a particular person). If we use the concept of figure and ground (Gestalt psychology), then the attribution process can be explained by what comes into the observer’s field of vision as a figure. Thus, in one experiment, subjects watched a video recording of a suspect giving testimony during interrogation. If they saw only the suspect, they perceived the confession as true. If a detective was also in the field of view, then the subjects (observers) were inclined to believe that the suspect was forced to confess to Myers D. Social psychology St. Petersburg: Peter Kom, 1998. P. 163.

In addition to errors arising due to different positions of the subject of perception, a whole series of quite typical mistakes attribution. G. Kelly summarized them as follows:

1st grade - motivational errors, including various types“defenses” [predilections, asymmetry of positive and negative results (success to oneself, failure to circumstances)];

Class 2 - fundamental errors, including cases of overestimation personal factors and underestimation of situational ones.

More specifically, fundamental errors manifest themselves in errors:

“false consent”(when a “normal” interpretation is considered to be one that coincides with “my” opinion and is adjusted to it);

related to unequal opportunities for role behavior(when in certain roles it is “easier” to demonstrate one’s own positive qualities, and interpretation is carried out by appealing to them);

arising from more trust in specific facts, than to general judgments, due to the ease of constructing false correlations, etc.

In order to justify the identification of this particular type of error, it is necessary to analyze the causality patterns that a person possesses. In offering descriptions of these schemes, G. Kelly puts forward four principles: covariation, discounting, amplification and systematic distortion. The first of these principles (covariation) operates when there is one cause, the other three when there are many causes.

The essence of the covariance principle is that an effect is attributed to the cause with which it is covariant in time (coincident in time). It should be remembered that we are always talking not about what the actual cause of an event is, but only about what reason a certain “naive” ordinary person actually attributes to an event or action. In other words, the reasons put forward in everyday psychology are explored here. This is clearly demonstrated in the analysis of the following three principles named by Kelly.

If there is more than one reason, then the person is guided when interpreting:

* or the principle of amplification, when priority is given to a cause that encounters an obstacle: it is “strengthened” in the consciousness of the perceiver by the very fact of the presence of such an obstacle;

* or the principle of depreciation, when, in the presence of competing reasons, one of the reasons is disavowed by the very fact of the presence of alternatives;

* or the principle of systematic distortion, when in a special case of judgments about people, factors of the situation are underestimated and, on the contrary, factors of personal characteristics are overestimated.

The process of attribution, determined by the characteristics of the subject of perception, is also manifested in the fact that some people tend, to a greater extent, to fix physical features in the process of interpersonal perception, and then the “sphere” of attribution is significantly reduced. Others perceive predominantly the psychological characteristics of others, and in this case a special “space” opens up for attribution.

The dependence of the attributed characteristics on the previous assessment of the objects of perception was also revealed. In one of the experiments, assessments of two groups of children given by the subject of perception were recorded. One group was made up of “favorite” children, and the other group was made up of “unloved” children. Although the “favorite” (in this case, more attractive) children intentionally made mistakes in performing the task, and the “unfavorite” children performed it correctly, the perceiver, nevertheless, attributed positive ratings to the “favorite” ones, and negative ones to the “unloved” ones. .

This corresponds to the idea of ​​F. Heider, who said that people generally tend to reason in this way: “a bad person has bad traits,” “a good person has good traits,” etc. Therefore, the attribution of causes of behavior and characteristics is carried out according to the same model: “bad” people are always assigned bad actions, and “good” people are always assigned good actions. Along with this, theories of causal attribution pay attention to the idea of ​​contrasting ideas, when a “bad” person is attributed negative traits, and the perceiver himself evaluates himself by contrast as the bearer of the most positive traits.