thing; sentiment is feeling lime doing something; belonging is going alone with something; obligation is feeling one ought to do something; and permission is being permitted to do something. There is no one-to-one relationship between observed behavior and cause of the behavior:
A variety of behaviors may be perceived as stemming from a single cause, or, conversely, one behavior may be thought to arise from several causes (Littlejohn, 1999, 132).
Attribution is concerned with how we use information to make causal inferences, and in recent years this area of inquiry has attracted the interest of many psychologists and researchers (Krupat, 1982, 13). Attribution theory has been much influenced by the writings of Kurt Lewin (Weiner, 1990, 1). Attributions are made by individuals all the time based on the degree of information they possess about a given perception and on the psychological processes that are engaged in making use of this information. Attributional activity has been examined and found to have certain basic tenets in terms of the processes of attribution, as noted by Harvey and Weary (1985):
1) Attribution is a pervasive activity that may occur spontaneously as one tries to organize the environment, or that may occur through more deliberate inferential or deductive activities. People may not be a le to report, or may not be willing to report, attribution activity, but this does not mean it does not take place.
2) Many real world events are quite complex, so attributions are often not completely accurate. There are a number of different attributional biases at work, and it has not been established that any one attributional bias is any more prevalent than any other. Just as the complexity of events always mitigates against perfectly accurate attribution, attributors often try to meet conflicting goals, such as self-esteem protection, self-presentation concerns, desire to be honest and since.
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