Attribution Theory The development of bias in an indiv

Attribution theory involves the way people infer the causes of behavior, and it centers on the perceived causes of behavior, explaining the processes by which the individual comes to understand his or her own behavior and that of others. Heider is the founder of attribution theory, and he notes several kinds of causal attributions made by people. Situational causes are those affected by the environment; personal effects are those things one influences personally; ability is the ability to do something; effort is the attempt to do something, desire is wanting to do something; sentiment is feeling lime doing something; belonging is going alone with something; obligation is feeling one oug

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ose a structure on the environment as we perceive it to maximize cognitive efficiency. We impose this structure by organizing features into meaningful clusters or categories. There are four characteristics to these categories. First, the categories reflect the actual structural organization of both man-made and natural phenomena, and recognition of this implicit structure is a consequence of observing the correlated occurrences of objects and attributes. A category is generally defined in terms of the dimensions that provide us with the greatest amount of salient information, and irrelevant or unimportant distinctions among members of a given category are ignored. Second, the categories consist of a number of objects that are considered equivalent, and this fact is reflected in the perceived similarity among the category members. Some researchers have even stated that categorization results in an exaggeration of the differences between members of different categories and an underestimation of differences among members of the same category. Third, characteristics of the members of the category are thought to be represented by a prototype, a plausible ideal case of the category. Finally, because category members are thought
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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