Attribution Theory: The Way We Make Judgments

Human beings are quite judgmental. Judging other people's behaviour seems to be a natural, inherent tendency wired in our minds and common behaviours. Whenever we see something (which we don't perceive as immediately harmful), one of the first reactions we tend to have, generally speaking, is to judge that something, in a way trying to frame it into our perception box, drawing from past experience and beliefs that are rooted in us. While the racing mind, where thoughts arise consecutively one after the other without us even noticing, can be acknowledged and worked upon by us through mindfulness practice and living in the present moment, this is out of the scope of this article, which is on the other hand concerned with the exploration of what is behind our judgment of people's (and our own) behaviour, some common patterns that can be noticed in that sphere, as well as biases and heuristics involved with judgment. Biases and heuristics are sort of mental fallacies everyone is subject to. Heuristics are mental shortcuts and simplifications of reality our minds put into practice in order to cope with the often very complex events happening in our lives. Biases are complete mistakes of judgment we are prone to making, due to the fact that our brains are inherently faulty.

One of the most frequent targets of judgment is human behaviour. Very often do we find ourselves trying to find causal relationships between a person's behaviour and internal versus external causes being the source of it. This is what attribution theory attempts to explain. Attribution theory is a branch of behavioural psychology which tries to explain the reasons behind why we judge people differently, what are the foundational principles we use when making judgments, what biases and heuristics are at play in this sphere, and why we tend to judge a behaviour as internally or externally caused.

This last factor of attribution theory is a crucial one. This framework of reference, as a matter of fact, suggests that “whenever we observe an individual's behaviour, we attempt to determine whether it was internally or externally caused.” (Robbins, 'Organizational Behaviour', Global Edition).

Let's take a small step back and see the whole picture as far as attribution theory is concerned, to then dive into the deeper layers of this psychological framework.