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The process by which we attempt to interpret and to explain the behaviour of other people - the causes of the actions. First investigated by Heider (1958)

We tend to attribute an action or event to a potential cause with which it covaries - provided that it varies only with the potential cause (distinctiveness) and does so on several occasions (consistency) and for several observers (consensus).

Jones and Davis - investigated the issue of how we decide that someone's behaviour is intentional when the information we have at our disposal is ambiguous. They believe that the goal of the attribution process is to be bale to make correspondent inferences i.e. to be able to infer that both the behaviour and the intention that produced it correspond to some underlying stable, feature of the person (i.e. a disposition).

We consider:

• choice - was the person situationally constrained or was the act one of apparent free will?
• social desirability - acting according to norms - much of the time we conform - there is nothing to explain.
• roles - when person behaves out of role we can use their actions to infer what they are really like.
• prior expectations - past experiences with the same actor.

Our major attribution task is to decide whether someone's action should be attributed to dispositional causes (their person's personality or attitudes) or to situational causes (social forces or external actors). Although almost all of our behaviour is the product of both the person and the situation, our causal explanations tend to emphasise one or the other. We tend to give too much weight to dispositional factors and too little to situational. This bias has been called the fundamental attribution error.

Heider believed that behaviour represents the figure against the ground comprising of context, roles, situational pressures and so on, that is, behaviour is conspicuous and situational factors are (comparatively) less easily perceived.

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