Kelley's Attribution Theory

Introduction

Attribution Theory has played a big part in social-psychological research. Unfortunately, the term attribution is confusing. According to one meaning, forming an attribution is making a dispositional/ personality inference from behavior; according to another meaning, forming an attribution is giving an explanation. The focus of this paper is on the comparison of Kelley’s covariation theory and Jones and Davis correspondent inference theory. Approaching from a perspective almost the same as that of Jones and Davis. There are three important features of the ideas proposed of Jones and Davis, these being: Information, beliefs and motivation. These are all subject to variance relating to their effect and importance according to individual

The general attributional approach recognizes that humans try to make sense of their surroundings and themselves and that this sense-making activity is an important part of the social phenomena under asking questions and trying to find the truth. Attribution theories, very differently, are theories of more clearly stated or related. Even though explanations and feature guesses (trait) based on what you 've been told are occasionally related, they are clear/separate in many ways. Most theorist sort out explanations of success or failure using polarities of three characteristics that can help define personality: locus of control, stability and Controllability

He developed a logical model for judging whether a particular action should be attributed to some (feature/ quality/ trait) of the person or the surrounding conditions. The term covariation simply means that a person has information from many instances observation, at different times and situations, and can perceive the covariation of an observed effect and its causes. He argues that in trying to discover the causes of behavior people take into account three kinds of evidence. Kelley believed that there were three types of causal information which influenced our judgments; consensus, distinctiveness and consistency. People attribute things causing other things to happen on the basis of relationship. One problem however is that we may not have enough information to make that kind of judgment. According to Kelley we fall back on past experience and look for either multiple necessary causes or multiple sufficient causes. Kelley 's models cover both multiple events and single events (internal and external) than that of Jones and Davis’ correspondent model. Kelley 's models detail the processes for making attributions of causality not only to other people but to environmental factors and to the self as well while Jones and Davis made statements about possible future events. Kelly 's model is more related when information is been observed overtime. Kelley 's model doesn 't work well for