Internal & external determination by group3

Attribution theory has been proposed to develop explanations of the ways in which judge people differently, depending on what meaning we attribute to a given behavior. Basically, the theory suggests that when we observe an individuals behavior, we attempt to determine whether it was internally or externally caused. That determination, however, depends largely on three factors that are distinctiveness, consensus and consistency.

Internally caused behaviors are those that are believed to be under personal control of the individuals. Externally caused behavior is seen as resulting from outside causes, that is the person is seen as having been forced into the behavior by the situation. If one of your employees is late f or work, you might attribute his lateness to his partying into the wee hours of the morning and then oversleeping. This would be an internal attribution. But if you attribute his arriving late to an automobile accident that tied up traffic on the road that this employee regularly uses, then you would be making an external attribution.

Distinctiveness refers to whether an individual displays different behaviors in different situations. Is the employee who arrives late today also the source of complaints by coworkers for being a “goof-off”? What we want to know is whether this behavior is unusual. If it is, the observer is likely to give behavior an external attribution. If this action is not unusual, it will probably be judged as internal.

If everyone who is face with a similar situation response in the same way we can say the behavior shows consensus. The behavior of the employee discussed above would meet this criterion of all employees who took the same route to work were also late. From an attribution perspective, if consensus is high, you would be expected to give an external attribution to the employee tardiness, whereas if other employees who took the same route made it to work on time, your conclusion as to causation would be internal.

Finally, an observer looks for consistency in a person’s actions. Does the person respond the same way over time? Coming in 10 minutes late for work is not perceived in the same way for the employee for whom it is an unusual case ( she has not been late for several months) as it is for the employee for whom t is part of routine pattern ( she is late 2 or 3 times a week). The more consistent the behavior, the more the observer inclined to attribute it to internal causes.