"Attribution theory concerns the process by which an individual interprets events "as being caused by particular parts of the relatively stable environment" (Heider, p. 297). Consideration of attribution theory is relevant for a symposium on motivation in several respects. The theory describes processes that operate as if the individual were motivated to attain a cognitive mastery of the causal structure of his environment."
Harold Kelley was an American social psychologist and professor of psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles. His major contributions have been the development of interdependence theory, the early work of attribution theory, and a lifelong interest in understanding close relationships processes. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Kelley as the 43rd most
"My purpose in this paper is to highlight some of the central ideas contained in Heiders theory, to present them in a systematic way, and to show their relevance to developments in several central fields of contemporary social psychology."
"Am I to take my enjoyment of a movie as a basis for an attribution to the movie (that it is intrinsically enjoyable) or for an attribution to myself (that I have a specific kind of desire relevant to movies)? The inference as to where to locate the dispositional properties responsible for the effect is made by interpreting the raw data (the enjoyment) in the context of subsidiary information from experiment-like variations of conditions."
"The last decade has seen a great deal of research on the perception of causation and the consequences of such perception. Conducted primarily within social psychology, the focus has been the perceived causes of other persons behavior. A parallel analysis has been made of the perceived causes of ones own behavior, and the liveliest recent topic has concerned differences between other-perception and self-perception. The study of perceived causation is identified by the term "attribution theory," attribution referring to the perception inference of cause. As we will see, there is not one but many attribution "theories" and the term refers to several different kinds of problem. The common ideas are that people interpret behavior in terms of its causes and that these interpretations play an important role in determining reactions to the behavior."
"Attributional research shows that attributions affect our feelings about past events and our expectations about future ones, our attitudes toward other persons and our reactions to their behavior, and our conceptions of ourselves and our efforts to improve our fortunes."
"Kelley’s (1967) paper on attribution theory in social psychology is generally considered the first systematic and general treatment of lay causal explanations. Kelley’s self-ascribed goal in the paper was “to highlight some of the central ideas contained in Heider’s theory” (Kelley, 1967, p. 192). Specifically, the two central ideas on which Kelley focused were:"
"PRIMACY The general notion here is that a person scans and interprets a sequence of information until he attains an attribution from it and then disregards later information or assimilates it to his earlier impression."