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Attribution theory describes how people explain the causes of behavior — their own and others'. Heider's foundational work distinguished internal (dispositional) attributions, which locate cause in personality or ability, from external (situational) attributions, which locate cause in circumstances. Kelley's covariation model proposes that people act like naive scientists, using consensus, consistency, and distinctiveness information to infer causes. Attribution judgments powerfully shape emotional and behavioral responses, including blame, empathy, and helping.
Apply Kelley's three dimensions (consensus, consistency, distinctiveness) to concrete scenarios — e.g., a student who fails one exam vs. one who always fails vs. one where everyone fails — to internalize the logic.
From your overview of social psychology, you know that a central question in the field is how people perceive and explain the social world. Attribution theory addresses one of the most fundamental such questions: when something happens — a colleague succeeds, a stranger is rude, you fail an exam — what causes do you assign? The answer matters enormously, because the cause you identify determines your emotional response, your behavior, and your prediction about the future. Attribution is not just an academic exercise; it is the backbone of blame, empathy, credit, and motivation.
Fritz Heider, the originator of attribution theory, proposed a simple but powerful distinction: causes can be located internally (inside the person — their personality, ability, effort, or character) or externally (in the situation — luck, task difficulty, social pressure, or circumstance). This is the fundamental attribution dimension. If you explain your exam failure as "I'm not smart enough," you have made an internal attribution. If you explain it as "the exam was unfair," you have made an external one. These attributions lead to very different emotional and behavioral consequences: internal attributions tend to produce pride (for success) or shame and helplessness (for failure), while external attributions leave self-esteem intact but may reduce motivation to change behavior.
Harold Kelley's covariation model extended Heider's framework into a more formal logic. Kelley proposed that attributors behave like naive scientists, assessing cause by examining how behavior covaries across three dimensions. Consensus asks: do other people behave this way in this situation? Consistency asks: does this person behave this way across time and occasions? Distinctiveness asks: does this person behave this way only in this situation, or in many situations? When consensus is high (others do it too), consistency is high (they always do it), and distinctiveness is high (they only do it here), the attribution points to the situation. When consensus is low, consistency is high, and distinctiveness is low (this person does this everywhere), the attribution points to the person.
The real power of attribution theory comes from understanding its systematic biases — the ways people predictably deviate from the rational covariation logic. People tend to underweight situational causes and overweight dispositional ones when explaining others' behavior, a pattern called the fundamental attribution error. When explaining their own behavior, people tend toward the reverse — emphasizing situational causes for failures and dispositional causes for successes (the self-serving bias). These patterns are not random noise; they are directional, replicable, and connected to broader cognitive shortcuts. From your study of cognitive biases, you can recognize these as instances of how fast, automatic processing diverges from deliberate, effortful reasoning — and why the same person can be simultaneously both a rational covariation analyst and a consistent over-attributor of personality.