Social entrepreneurship through cultural heritage-CHEER - EN

The word “attribution” literally means the grant of responsibility and tries to explain the behavior attributed to a person or situation. Heider (1958) advances the theory concerned with how people perceived the behavior of themselves and other people. Heider (1958) initiated the theory, later Weiner and colleaguesⁱ developed a theoretical framework that has become a major research paradigm of social psychology. Heider divided the behavior attribute into internal and external factors. Internal attribution describes the behaviour within a person and factors attributes like character, attitude, aptitude and personality. In the case of external attribution, the situation gets assign to cause of a particular behavior e.g. the assignment of environment or weather to causality. Weiner (1974) advances a three-stage process that underlies an attribution.

(i) The person must perceive or observe the behavior.

(ii) Then the person must believe that the behavior was intentionally performed, and

(iii) the person must determine if they believe the other person was forced to perform the behavior (in which case the cause is attributed to the situation) or not (in which case the cause is attributed to the other person).

Weiner confined the theory on the most important factors affecting the attribution for achievement such as ability, effort, task difficulty, and luck. Weiner also classified attribution along three causal dimensions: locus of control, stability, and controllability. The locus of control further differentiates into either internal or external.

The stability dimension analyses whether there are changes over time attributed to causes. For example, we can have ability that is stable and internal; or an effort that is unstable and internal. Controllability is in reference to the causes one is able to control (e.g. skill/efficacy), and from causes one cannot control (e.g. aptitude, mood, other’s actions, and luck).ⁱⁱ