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 able 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 sincere.
3) For the most part, people behave according to their perceptions and understandings, and this can be seen as a fundamental position of attribution theorists.
4) Attribution often serves the needs of human adaptation, and this means that attribution may involve a relatively unbiased search for the causal sequence in some phenomenon. It may also be highly biased, but even here attributions may be adaptive in their tranquilizing functions (Harvey, Weary, and Stanley, 1985, 2-3).
Biases have been identified by several researchers examining the attribution process. First, it is believed that we have a t...