It often happens that people try to explain the strange or defiant behavior of another person, based on their own perception of the whole situation. When this happens, a person simply interprets the act and his motives in such a way as if he himself committed it.
Psychological substitution
This psychological substitution of actors has a complex name in psychology - casual attribution. This means that someone does not have enough 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 the lack of other ways to explain the situation. Of course, such an interpretation of behavior motives is often erroneous, because each person thinks in his own way, and it is practically impossible to “try on” his own way of thinking on another person.
The emergence of the theory of attribution in psychology
The concept of "casual attribution" in psychology appeared not so long ago - only in the middle of the 20th century. It was introduced by American psychologists and sociologists Harold Kelly, Fritz Hyder and Lee Ross. This concept not only became widely used, but also acquired its own theory. The researchers believed that casual attribution would help them explain the average person’s interpretation of some cause-effect relationships or even their own behavior. When a person makes some kind of moral choice, which leads to certain actions, he always leads a dialogue with himself. Attribution theory is trying to explain how this dialogue goes, what are its stages and results, depending on the psychological characteristics of the person. At the same time, a person, analyzing his behavior, does not identify him 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 action in question with the so-called socio-role expectations. For example, if a person has very little or no information about a particular person, the more he will invent and attribute, and the more he will be convinced of his own rightness.
The second indicator is the conformity of the behavior of the person in question with generally accepted cultural and ethical standards. The more norms the other person violates, the more active the attribution will be. The phenomenon of “attribution" itself occurs in the theory of attribution of three types:
- personal (a causal relationship is projected onto the subject himself who performs the action);
- object (communication is projected to the object to which this action is directed);
- circumstance (connection is attributed to circumstances).
Casual attribution mechanisms
It is not surprising that a person who discusses 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 to someone certain personal motives.
Being active participants in society, people try not to draw conclusions about each other, based only on external observations. As you know, appearance is often misleading. That is why casual attribution helps people to formulate some conclusions, relying 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 from one specific situation. Man is a creature too complex to reason about so easily.
Why casual attribution is not always good
There are many examples in the literature and cinema, when errors of casual attribution led to the destruction of human lives. A very good example is the film “Atonement”, where the little main character draws a conclusion about another character, only relying on the peculiarities of her own children's perception of the situation. As a result, the lives of many people collapse only because she misunderstood something. The probable causes that we suppose are very often erroneous, therefore one can never argue about them as the ultimate truth, even if it seems that there can be no doubt. If we cannot even figure out 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 speculations and doubts.