Reported by:

Caymo, Eenah Antoinette P.

Miramo, Hannah Lois T.

II-1 BECED

Attribution Theory

Proponent

Theory

Classroom Application

Fritz Heider(February 18, 1896 –

January 2, 1988)

• an Austrian psychologist whose work was related to the Gestalt school.

• Born in Vienna, Austria• At the age of 24 he received a Ph.D. from the

University of Graz, for his innovative study of the causal structure of perception, and traveled to Berlin, where he worked at the Psychology Institute.

• In 1930, Heider was offered an opportunity to conduct research at the Clarke School for the Deaf in Northampton, Massachusetts, which was associated with Smith College, also in Northampton.

• Heider published two important articles in 1944 that pioneered the concepts of social perception and causal attribution (Heider, 1944; Heider & Simmel, 1944).

• In 1957, Heider was hired by the University of Kansas, after being recruited by social psychologist Roger Barker (Heider, 1983).

• Heider's The Psychology of Interpersonal Relations (1958) was written in collaboration with the uncredited Beatrice Wright, a founder of rehabilitiation psychology.

• Heider died at his home in Lawrence, Kansas, on 2 January 1988 at the age of 91.

Bernard Weiner1935-present

• born in 1935 in Chicago, Illinois, the youngest of three sons of Russian immigrants.

• A product of Chicago's public schools, he received his undergraduate degree in Liberal Arts from the University of Chicago in 1955 and an MBA, majoring in Industrial Relations, from the same university in 1957.

• is a cognitive psychologist who is known for developing a form of attribution theory that explains the emotional and motivational entailments of academic success and failure.

• Following two years of service in the U.S. Army, Weiner enrolled in a PhD program in personality at the University of Michigan, where he was mentored by John Atkinson, one of the leading personality and motivational psychologists of that era.

• Weiner completed his PhD from Michigan in 1963, spent two years as an assistant professor at the University of Minnesota before joining the psychology faculty at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) in 1965, where he remained active into the early 2000s.

• As of 2008, Weiner had authored 13 books and published more than 200 articles in peer-reviewed journals.

• He was the recipient of numerous awards, including the Donald Campbell Research Award in Social Psychology from the American Psychological Association and the Palmer O. Johnson Publication Award from the American Educational Research Association.

• He holds honorary degrees from the Bielefeld University in Germany and Turku University in Finland.

“A person's own perceptions or attributions for success or failure

determine the amount of effort the person will expend on that activity in

the future.”

What is the Attribution Theory?

• It is concerned with how individuals interpret events and how this relates to their thinking and behavior.

• Heider (1958) was the first to propose a psychological theory of attribution, but Weiner and colleagues (e.g., Jones et al, 1972; Weiner, 1974, 1986) developed a theoretical framework that has become a major research paradigm of social psychology.

• Attribution theory assumes that people try to determine why people do what they do, i.e., attribute causes to behavior.

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Principles1. Attribution is a three stage process:

a) behavior is observed

b) behavior is determined to be deliberate, and

c) behavior is attributed to internal or external causes.

2. Achievement can be attributed to:a) effort is an internal and unstable

factor over which the learner can exercise a great deal of control.

b) ability is a relatively internal and stable factor over which the learner does not exercise much direct control.

c) level of task difficulty is an external and stable factor that is largely beyond the learner's control.

d) luck is an external and unstable factor over which the learner exercises very little control.

3. Causal dimensions of behavior are: a) locus of control

b) Stability

c) Controllability

According to attribution theory, the explanations that people tend to make to explain success or failure can be analyzed in terms of three sets of characteristics:

• First, the cause of the success or failure may be internal or external. That is, we may succeed or fail because of factors that we believe have their origin within us or because of factors that originate in our environment.

• Second, the cause of the success or failure may be either stable or unstable. If the we believe cause is stable, then the outcome is likely to be the same if we perform the same behavior on another occasion. If it is unstable, the outcome is likely to be different on another occasion.

• Third, the cause of the success or failure may be either controllable or uncontrollable. A controllable factor is one which we believe we ourselves can alter if we wish to do so. An uncontrollable factor is one that we do not believe we can easily alter.

Students will be most persistent at academic tasks under the following circumstances:

1. if they attribute their academic successes to either:

– internal, unstable, factors over which they have control (e.g., effort) or

– internal, stable, factors over which they have little control but which may sometimes be disrupted by other factors (e.g., ability disrupted by occasional bad luck); and

2. if they attribute their failures to internal, unstable factors over which they have control (e.g., effort).

Below are eight reasons representing the eight combinations of locus, stability, and responsibility in Weiner's model of attributions.

• Internal-stable-uncontrollable (ex) Low aptitude • Internal-stable-controllable (ex) Never studies • Internal-unstable-uncontrollable (ex) Sick the day

of the exam • Internal-unstable-controllable (ex) Did not study

for the particular test • External-stable-uncontrollable (ex) School has hard

requirements • External-stable-controllable (ex) Instructor is

biased • External-unstable-uncontrollable (ex) Bad luck • External-unstable-controllable (ex) Friends failed

to help (Woolfolk, 1995, pp. 346-347)

Classroom Application1) Attributional training hypothesis

- students who are trained to attribute academic success or failure to effort are more likely to work hard than students who attribute their performance to ability.

2) Attributional feedback hypothesis- when teachers who show sympathy or pity when students fail convey the idea that students lack ability (Mayer, 254).

Classroom Strategies1. Simply telling students to “try harder” is not very

effective. Students who are not doing well need to see evidence that effort on their part p[ay off, that they can improve, and that their academic performance can change.

2. Remember that students’ individual perceptions of success lie at the center of attribution and its variations.

3. Deemphasize luck as a factor in students’ achievement and emphasize ability as what really counts.

4. Help failure-avoiding students to set realistic goals.

5. There is research to show that attributions can change-that students can alter their beliefs about what they can control in the world.

6. Help students feel worthwhile, adequate and successful during the many interactions that occur daily.

7. Prepare and assign tasks that have various levels of difficulty built into them.

8. Look for behaviors to praise, but make it honest praise.

9. When dealing with high-achievement-motivation students, providing them with tasks and problems that offer opportunities for a mix of failure and success is most likely to sustain their high motivation.

10. When dealing with low-achievement-motivation students, providing them with tasks and problems that provide mainly success, particularly during the early phases of new learning, is more likely to keep them interested.