Attribution (Psychology)

Attribution is a term used in psychology for how individuals perceive the causes of their everyday experience, categorizing a cause as either external, coming from the environment, or internal, coming from the person themselves; the broader models built to explain this process are called attribution theory. Psychological research into attribution began with the work of Fritz Heider in the early twentieth century, who first introduced the concept of a perceived locus of causality to describe how a person perceives their own environment, and the theory was later advanced further by Harold Kelley and Bernard Weiner. Psychologists use a person's attributions, their initial perceptions of what caused an experience, to better understand that person's own motivation and competence, a use of particular interest to employers seeking to increase worker motivation, goal orientation and productivity, and psychologists have also identified various systematic biases in how people attribute causation, especially when explaining the behavior of other people rather than their own.