How do people explain their own and other people’s behaviour?
People’s explanations of behaviour come from making attributions. Attributions are when we assign a causal meaning behind behaviour (Michael A. Hogg, 2014). For example, someone may attribute being given a compliment to dispositional factors such as them looking good or to external factors such at the other person being friendly. Attribution theories are not necessarily the actual cause of behaviour, but scientific theories behind what humans perceive to be the cause of behaviour (Försterling, 2013). Throughout our life we will construct our own, naive reasons for other peoples’ behaviour in order to gain a stable and predictive view of the world around us. While they are prone to …show more content…
Hogg, 2014). We observe behaviours over a number of situations and make causal attributions that suggest one causes another. We may also observe an opposite emotion when the effect is absent. We can identify which factor is to be assigned a causal role for the behaviour through consistency (how often the behaviour co-occurs), distinctiveness (whether other effects also cause a similar behaviour) and consensus information (whether others behave similarly). For example, if consistency is low we are likely to attribute the behaviour to a different cause, however if the consistency is high then when distinctiveness and consensus are high it is likely an external cause compared to if they are low then it is an internal cause. (COULD USE SOME REWORDING)
Can Blaming Victims of Rape be Logical? Attribution Theory and Discourse Analytic Perspectives (http://hum.sagepub.com/content/54/4/445.short)
(beattie (1998), for example, analyzed actual conversations between men and women talking about rape. They found that men tended to use the reasoning outlined in Kelley’s model by making reference to consensus, distinctiveness, and consistency, as well as by using these types of information to formulate attributions for behavior. Women, on the other hand, made less use of these variables and introduced the variable of …show more content…
We cannot always use our own thoughts and feelings to gauge our own behaviour, so when these are weak we must look for other means to make inferences about ourselves. We can introspect on our own behaviour and by making causal links between effects and actions we can depict an accurate image of ourselves. (Michael A. Hogg, 2014)

Our own behaviour in task achievement has also been demonstrated by Weiner’s model. People first assess whether they have succeeded or failed and then make causal attributions based on the result. The attribution of the behaviour is directed by whether they believe it was caused by factors internal or external, stable or unstable and the controllability of the behaviour.
(Paul Tuss, Jules Zimmer, and Hsiu-Zu Ho (1995) and Donald Mizokawa and David Rickman (1990) report, for instance, that Asian and Asian American students are more likely to attribute academic failure and success to effort than are European American students, who are more likely to attribute performance to ability. European American students are also more likely to attribute failure to task difficulty. Interestingly, as Asian Americans spend more time in the United States, they place less emphasis on the role of effort in