Attribution Theory

Attribution theory is a body of psychological theory concerned with how people explain the causes of events and behavior, tracing its origins to the work of the psychologist Fritz Heider in the mid-twentieth century, who studied how people perceive the causes of everyday experience as coming from either the person or the situation. The framework was substantially developed by later theorists including Bernard Weiner and Harold Kelley; Weiner proposed that the explanations, or attributions, a person makes for past successes and failures shape their expectations and actions in the future, and organized these explanations along three underlying dimensions: locus, whether a cause is internal or external to the person; stability, whether a cause is likely to remain the same or change over time; and controllability, whether a cause is something the person can control. In education, attribution theory is used to explain how the reasons a student gives for succeeding or failing at a task, such as attributing a poor grade to lack of ability versus lack of effort, shape that student's later motivation, effort and persistence, and researchers have also studied how teachers' own attributions about student performance can in turn affect classroom practice.