[4] Or rather, simplified, dispositional attribution is the act of placing blame on some type of factor or criteria that could be controlled by an individual for the cause of a certain event.
[5] Attribution theory was developed by Fritz Heider in 1958, who originally examined the process by which people explain the causes of behaviours and events, and if it was caused by internal factors, such as personality or intentions, or external circumstances, like environmental or situational conditions.
[7] Jones and Davis’s Correspondent Inference Theory (1965) outlines the five sources of information we use to distinguish intentionality to make dispositional attributions.
Hedonistic relevance, if someone’s behaviour is directly aimed at helping or harming us, it is likely to be assumed as intentional.
Covariation reflects the process of examining how behaviour is consistently associated with particular causes, allowing people to infer if their actions stem from the person, the situation, or both.
Established by Semin & Fiedler in 1988, the Linguistic Category Model outlines how language plays a role in systematic cognitive inferences, particularly when it comes to attributions and intergroup relations.
[16] This model outlines that while using verbs to describe a person’s behavior is more common in Asian cultures and is tied to situational attribution (eg.
"Harry helps Serena"), Europeans typically use more adjectives to make overall statements about the disposition of a person (eg.