Creating Attributions: The Key to Explaining Behaviour

This post

goes over an example of the different theories that influence the behavior depending on the different kinds of information available. 

Attribution Theory deals with the ways people infer causes of behaviour. The theory explains our appraisals about the reasons for behaviour and how these appraisals influence how we evaluate communication.  This makes it an important theory that is relevant to many aspects of interpersonal communication.  Without attributions we would be living life without our own thoughts on social behaviour. We would not be able to explain behaviours with respect to situations.   

 We can make personality and situational attributions.   For example:  An individual tells an acquaintance that the latest Die Hard Movie is fantastic and recommends he go and see it.  Does his friend follow his recommendation?  He will come to a conclusion that makes him question whether this movie is any good.  He may assume that his friend liked this movie because he likes all movies.  He may also assume that it was a hot day and his friend enjoyed the air-conditioning of the theatre. 

Subjective biases will influence his perception of the movie.  This is referred to as ‘Naïve Realism.’  Whatever his perception of his friends advice it will seem real and enable him to make a decision about whether to see the movie.  This perception will come from certain auditory cues he picks up from his friends explanation and visual cues he has seen about the movie.  This will occur without him even realising it! 

His thinking will not all be clinical and automatic.  He is also capable of evaluating the suitability of the movie in a clinical, mindful way.  This mindless and mindful thinking is referred to as dual processing.  When deciding whether to see the movie his perception will involve three steps:

1.    Attention and identification,

2.    controlled categorization;

3.    And Personalisation. 

During the first stage, his subconscious will focus on his goals and motivations.  He may ask himself if he likes the genre of the movie or if he even wants to see a movie.  During the second stage, he will take a more systematic evaluation and draw upon his expectation of the movie.  Finally, he will compare his own interests and the interests of his friend.  Upon completing these three stages he will be ready to make a decision about whether to see the movie.

To conclude, this post has examined the set of behaviours that someone goes through when they decide whether to see a movie on the advice of a friend.  Three important and relevant interpersonal communication theories have been discussed.  They are Attribution Theory, Naïve Realism and Subjective bias.