Harold Kelley Quotes

My purpose in this paper is to highlight some of the central ideas contained in Heider's theory, to present them in a systematic way, and to show their relevance to developments in several central fields of contemporary social psychology.

Am I to take my enjoyment of a movie as a basis for an attribution to the movie (that it is intrinsically enjoyable) or for an attribution to myself (that I have a specific kind of desire relevant to movies)? The inference as to where to locate the dispositional properties responsible for the effect is made by interpreting the raw data (the enjoyment) in the context of subsidiary information from experiment-like variations of conditions.

[Kelley argued that OS's judgment of an inverse relation between inducement magnitude and attitude inference] is probably associated with assumptions (unchecked in Bern’s work, as far as I know) that there is a distribution of opinion toward the task, and only the more favorable subjects complied in the $1 case and almost all, favorable or not, complied in the $20 case.

PRIMACY The general notion here is that a person scans and interprets a sequence of information until he attains an attribution from it and then disregards later information or assimilates it to his earlier impression.

Attributional research shows that attributions affect our feelings about past events and our expectations about future ones, our attitudes toward other persons and our reactions to their behavior, and our conceptions of ourselves and our efforts to improve our fortunes.

Solutions require thinking through a series of interrelated steps or stages, analyzing a number of rules at each point, and always keeping in mind conclusions reached at earlier points.

SALIENCE The notion here is that an effect is attributed to the cause that is most salient in the perceptual field at the time the effect is observed.

The last decade has seen a great deal of research on the perception of causation and the consequences of such perception. Conducted primarily within social psychology, the focus has been the perceived causes of other persons' behavior. A parallel analysis has been made of the perceived causes of one's own behavior, and the liveliest recent topic has concerned differences between other-perception and self-perception. The study of perceived causation is identified by the term "attribution theory," attribution referring to the perception inference of cause. As we will see, there is not one but many attribution "theories" and the term refers to several different kinds of problem. The common ideas are that people interpret behavior in terms of its causes and that these interpretations play an important role in determining reactions to the behavior.

A person is known by the behavior he displays consistently. An experiment by Himmelfarb (1972) makes the important point that consistency in other persons' characterizations of an actor carries more weight if they are based on observations in dissimilar rather than similar situations. The other side of the coin is that a person's inconsistent behavior is attributed not to him but to circumstances.

Attribution theory concerns the process by which an individual interprets events "as being caused by particular parts of the relatively stable environment" (Heider, p. 297). Consideration of attribution theory is relevant for a symposium on motivation in several respects. The theory describes processes that operate as if the individual were motivated to attain a cognitive mastery of the causal structure of his environment.