That makes (con)sense(us)!

Hey everyone! Sorry for the terrible title (It's late).

This week I'm going to tackle attributions and one theory as to how people make them. As explained by Fritz Heider (1958) attributions are simply explanations for other's behavior and the theory that describes this process is known as attribution theory.

One theory that sprung from Heider's (1958) ideas about attributions is the covariation theory (Kelley, 1967). According to the covariation principle, something only explains (is the cause of) a behavior if it is both present when the behavior is present, but also absent when the behavior is absent (Kelley, 1967). There are three kinds of information that are useful for determining behavior, those being, consensus, distinctiveness, and consistency and these three kinds of information are used to understand and make attributions about an individual's behavior (Kelley, 1967).

Consensus information refers to determining if different people behave or react similarly or differently to the same stimulus (Kelley, 1967). This information allows attributions be attributed more to the situation or to the individual; if consensus is high (i.e. a lot of people respond the same way to the stimulus) then behavior is attributed to the stimulus, if consensus is low (i.e. different people respond in a number of different ways to the same stimulus) then behavior is attributed to the individual (Kelly, 1967).

The second type of information is distinctiveness. When deciding about an individual's behavior you would also like to know how they respond to other situations or stimuli (Kelly, 1967). If the behavior is low in distinctiveness (i.e. an individual responds the same way to all situations), their response is attributed to the individual; if distinctiveness is high (i.e. the individual does not always respond in the same way to a variety of situations) then behavior is attributed to the stimulus (Kelly, 1967).

Lastly, consistency information regards determining if the behavior is present every time the stimulus occurs or only some of the time (Kelley, 1967). If the behavior always occurs when the stimulus occurs then the behavior is high in consistency and is attributed to either the individual or the stimulus depending on whether the behavior is also high or low in consistency or distinctiveness; if the behavior is low in consistency (i.e. the behavior does not always occur when the stimulus does) then the behavior may be attributed to other irrelevant factors that relate to the situation and not due to the actual stimulus itself (Kelly, 1967).

As an example of this theory and process, my friend's girlfriend was recently mean to him for an entire day. Mostly she was not very responsive and generally grumpy and resulted in responding in less than nice ways to jokes, etc. When trying to decide the reason for this behavior I asked my friend why his girlfriend was acting this way and he attributed it to her large amount of homework and obligations she had that day. This is a fine explanation but I was not certain that it was the true explanation and the way to better determine if this was the true cause was to examine the three sources of information. First is consensus. Do people usually respond in grumpy ways when they have a lot of work to complete? Not always but that is definitely a common way for people to act when they are stressed, therefore I considered consensus to be high which therefore lended support to the probability that her behavior was due to the stimulus (i.e. her large workload). Next was distinctiveness, or, does this person react to different situations similarly. Generally, this person is in a good mood and is very pleasant to be around, therefore, distinctiveness was high (as they usually act differently) and again, it was likely that her behavior was due to her large workload. Last was consistency, or does this individual always respond this way when the stimulus is present. Well, unfortunately for my friend (because his girlfriend is a go getter and often has a lot of work) his girlfriend basically always responds in this way when she is very stressed, therefore consistency is high and the behavior was not attributed to random irrelevant situational factors.

Because both distinctiveness and consensus were high (and consistency was not low) I agreed with my friend and decided that her grumpy behavior was due to her situation (i.e. the large workload and high stress) and was not a personal factor. 

(Word count: 730)

Heider, F. (1958). The psychology of interpersonal relations. New York: Wiley.

Kelley, H. H. (1967). Attribution in social psychology. Nebraska Symposium on Motivation, 15, 192-238.