Causal Attribution

Abstract

Psychologists Use The Term attribution in two ways. One represents an attributive process, in which a characteristic is imputed to a target. In a study by Jones and Harris (1967), for example, participants imputed proand anti-Castro attitudes to other people. Inferring and imputing dispositions involves processes other than causal attribution, although attribution probably plays a big part. The second use of “attribution” refers to a process whose cognitive outcome is a temporally ordered sequence in which an element X is perceived as causing an effect Y. This chapter is concerned with this latter process. We mention the distinction because the principles of imputing dispositions probably differ from the principles of attribution.