Evaluate the Contribution of Attribution Theories and Related Research in Helping Us to Understand the Way in Which People Perceive and Explain Their Social Environment: Essay Example
EVALUATE THE CONTRIBUTION OF ATTRIBUTION THEORIES AND RELATED RESEARCH IN HELPING US TO UNDERSTAND THE WAY IN WHICH PEOPLE PERCEIVE AND EXPLAIN THEIR SOCIAL ENVIRONMENT:
Social cognition explains the way people process knowledge relating to the social world. One way of judging the social world, is by attributing certain causes to particular behaviours. This is done through the use of attribution theories that use past stored information to come to the correct conclusions. Attribution theories help us understand what information we use and why we chose it, to assign a particular cause to an event. In 1958, Heider, (as cited in Buchanan, Anand, Joffe & Thomas, 2007) was the first to develop the idea that resulted in the creation of attribution theories. He said that people are like scientists who seek causes when evaluating people’s actions and categorise them as either internal/dispositional causes or external/situational causes. This essay will begin by describing the different types of attribution theories as well as some of their related research. It will then proceed to evaluate how useful attribution theories are in allowing us to understand how people make sense of social events. This will be done by highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of all the theories mentioned.
The first attribution theory was presented by Jones and Davis (1965). They decided that we favour attributing internal causes when judging others as they teach us more about the person than external causes. The next theory, developed by Harold Kelley (1967) is known as the covariation model. This theory compares people to intuitive scientists who use previous information to consider how particular behaviours and situations covary. We assess this covariation by using three variables: consistency, consensus and distinctiveness (CCD) (as cited in Buchanan et al., 2007). The usual way of conducting research on this theory, is with the use of vignettes containing this CCD information, such as
Social cognition explains the way people process knowledge relating to the social world. One way of judging the social world, is by attributing certain causes to particular behaviours. This is done through the use of attribution theories that use past stored information to come to the correct conclusions. Attribution theories help us understand what information we use and why we chose it, to assign a particular cause to an event. In 1958, Heider, (as cited in Buchanan, Anand, Joffe & Thomas, 2007) was the first to develop the idea that resulted in the creation of attribution theories. He said that people are like scientists who seek causes when evaluating people’s actions and categorise them as either internal/dispositional causes or external/situational causes. This essay will begin by describing the different types of attribution theories as well as some of their related research. It will then proceed to evaluate how useful attribution theories are in allowing us to understand how people make sense of social events. This will be done by highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of all the theories mentioned.
The first attribution theory was presented by Jones and Davis (1965). They decided that we favour attributing internal causes when judging others as they teach us more about the person than external causes. The next theory, developed by Harold Kelley (1967) is known as the covariation model. This theory compares people to intuitive scientists who use previous information to consider how particular behaviours and situations covary. We assess this covariation by using three variables: consistency, consensus and distinctiveness (CCD) (as cited in Buchanan et al., 2007). The usual way of conducting research on this theory, is with the use of vignettes containing this CCD information, such as