Surely everyone came across a situation where, due to a lack of information, a misinterpretation of other people's emotions and feelings, a person is distortingly evaluates one or another act of another. Most often, these conclusions are based on their own speculation or the prevailing opinion of a person.
History and study of the phenomenon in psychology
The founder of the term "causal attribution" in psychology was researcher F. Hyder in the middle of the twentieth century. For the first time, he voiced schemes showing the reasons why a person creates an opinion about an event or person. Hyder’s idea was immediately picked up by other psychologists, in particular Lee Ross and George Kelly.
Kelly did a tremendous job of understanding the causes of behavior, expanding the scope of research to the grounds of attributing
emotions and feelings. The more one person gets to know the other, the more he is filled with a desire to know the motive of his actions. In the process of cognition, a person relies on data already known to him, but sometimes it is too little to create a holistic picture of behavior and an explanation of actions. The question cannot remain unresolved, due to a lack of information, a person begins to think up something that he could not explain. That is, ignorance of the causes of other people's actions gives a person a reason to invent them himself, relying on his own observations of the behavior of another person.
This phenomenon is described in psychology as "causal attribution."
Criteria for attributing causes of behavior for Kelly.
A significant step in the development of psychology was helped by causal attribution as a phenomenon of interpersonal communication. 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);
by such behavior a person is different from others (criterion of exclusivity);
commonality of behavior (consensus criterion).
If a person solves a problem like the previous ones, then his behavior is constant. When a person answers in an entirely different way when answering an obvious question, the conclusion about the principle of exclusivity begs. "In this situation, many behave this way" - a direct proof of custom. In the search for reasons for explaining someone else's behavior, a person more or less fits into this scheme. It gives only general characteristics, and the set of reasons for each is individual. The question remains, which causal attribution has not yet been able to answer: to use each of the criteria in which situation will a person resort?
Manifestation of causal attribution in relation to oneself and others
A feature of this phenomenon is that a person applies completely different motives of behavior to 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 the other person has not completed the task assigned to him, we give him the title of lazy person and irresponsible person. If I didn’t complete the task, it means that the weather prevented me, loud music behind the wall, poor health , etc. The reason for this view is that we consider our behavior to be normal, and we treat the behavior different from ours as abnormal.