It often happens that people try to explain the strange or challenging behavior of another person, based on their own perception of the whole situation. When this happens, the person simply interprets the act and its motives as if they had done it themselves.
Psychological substitution
Such a psychological substitution of actors has a complex name in psychology - casual attribution. This means that someone has insufficient information about the situation or about the person who appears in this situation, and therefore tries to explain everything from his own point of view. Casual attribution implies that a person "puts himself in the place of another" for lack of other ways to explain the current situation. Of course, such an interpretation of the motives of behavior is often erroneous, because each person thinks in his own way, and it is almost impossible to “try on” your way of thinking on another person.
The emergence of attribution theory in psychology
The concept of "causal attribution" in psychology appeared not so long ago - only in the middle of the 20th century. It was introduced by American sociologists Harold Kelly, Fritz Heider and Lee Ross. This concept has not only become widely used, but also acquired its own theory. The researchers believed that causal attribution would help them explain how the average person interprets certain causal relationships or even their own behavior. When a person makes some kind of moral choice that leads to certain actions, he always conducts a dialogue with himself. The attribution theory tries to explain how this dialogue takes place, what are its stages and the result, depending on the psychological characteristics of a person. At the same time, a person, analyzing his behavior, does not identify it with the behavior of strangers. It's easy to explain: someone else's soul is dark, but a person knows himself much better.
Attribution classification
As a rule, each theory assumes the presence of certain indicators that are mandatory for its functioning. Casual attribution, therefore, implies the presence of two indicators at once. The first indicator is the factor of compliance of the considered action with the so-called social-role expectations. For example, if a person has very little or no information about a certain person, the more he will invent and ascribe, and the more he will be convinced of his own rightness.
The second indicator is the compliance of the behavior with the consideredpersonality to generally accepted cultural and ethical norms. The more norms the other person violates, the more active the attribution will be. The very same phenomenon of "attribution" occurs in the theory of attribution of three types:
- personal (the causal relationship is projected onto the subject who performs the action);
- objective (the connection is projected to the object to which this action is directed);
- circumstantial (link attributed to circumstances).
Casual attribution mechanisms
It is not surprising that a person who talks about the situation "from the outside", without participating in it directly, explains the actions of other participants in the situation from a personal point of view. If he directly takes part in the situation, then he takes into account circumstantial attribution, that is, he first considers the circumstances, and only then ascribes certain personal motives to someone.
Being active participants in society, people try not to draw conclusions about each other, based only on external observations. As you know, looks can often be deceiving. That is why casual attribution helps people to formulate some conclusions based on the analysis of the actions of others, "passed" through the filter of their own perception. Of course, such conclusions are also not always true, because it is impossible to judge a person by one particular situation. Man is too complex a creature to talk about him so easily.
Why casual attribution isn't alwaysgood
There are many examples in literature and cinema where casual attribution errors have led to the destruction of human lives. A very good example is the film Atonement, where the little protagonist draws a conclusion about another character, only based on the peculiarities of her own children's perception of the situation. As a result, many people's lives are ruined just because she misunderstood something. The probable causes that we assume are very often erroneous, so it is never possible to talk about them as the ultimate truth, even if it seems that there can be no doubt. If we cannot understand even our own inner world, what can we say about the inner world of another person? We must strive to analyze indisputable facts, and not our own conjectures and doubts.
