Motivation theory in attribution theory

1958, Fritz Heider put forward the attribution theory from the perspective of naive psychology in his book Psychology of Interpersonal Relations, which mainly solved how people find out the causes of events in their daily lives. Hyde believes that people have two strong motives: one is to form a consistent understanding of the surrounding environment; The second is the need to control the environment. In order to meet these two needs, people must be able to predict how others will act. Therefore, Hyde pointed out that everyone (not just psychologists) tries to explain other people's behavior, and they all have theories about other people's behavior.

Hyde believes that there are two reasons for the incident: one is internal factors, such as mood, attitude, personality, ability and so on; The second is external factors, such as external pressure, weather and situation. When explaining other people's behavior, most people tend to attribute it to their own personality. When explaining a person's behavior, one tends to attribute it to the situation.

Hyde also pointed out that when attributing, people often use two principles: one is the covariant principle, that is, in many different situations, specific reasons are related to specific results. When the cause does not exist, the result will not appear, so we can attribute the result to the cause, which is the principle of * * * *. For example, if a person always hesitates before the exam and complains about the world, but is happy at other times, we will associate awkwardness with the exam and attribute it to the exam rather than personality. The second is the principle of exclusion, that is, if the internal and external reasons are enough to explain the event, the attribution on the other hand can be ruled out. For example, when a vicious criminal kills another person, we will exclude external attribution and attribute it to internal factors such as his nature.