Assume spotting a server in a restaurant flirting with a customer. The server's actions create an intriguing question: Why is the server acting this way? The result from internal or external causes? Is he merely someone who enjoys flirting (an internal cause)? Or is the client an alluring person who attracts much attention (an external cause)? According to Kelley's model, if you were an observer of this scene, your choice would be based on information about the three aspects of consensus, consistency, and distinctiveness.
Determining the reasons behind occurrences or behaviors is known as attribution in social psychology. People make attributions in order to make sense of their experiences, and the manner in that people connect is greatly influenced by attributes. In reality, we all frequently engage in attribution daily without being conscious of the underlying assumptions and biases that shape our conclusions.
Multiple behaviors are taken into account by Kelley's (1967) co-variation attribution model. Significantly, it describes the procedures leading to internal and external attributions. According to Kelley, the co-variation principle is used to attribute causality. According to this principle, something must be present when a certain behavior is present and absent when the behavior is missing for it to be the cause of that behavior (i.e., it must co-vary). We assign causality to one of several possible explanations that closely correlate with the observed behavior, behaving, as Heider (1958) put it, "just like naive scientists." According to the co-variation model, three categories of information—consensus, consistency, and distinctiveness of information—are essential for determining whether attribution is internal or external. The cumulative effect of these three pieces of information will decide what kind of attribution is formed while viewing someone behaving in a specific social setting.
Consensus information refers to the degree to which other characters behave similarly to the target individual. The degree of consensus increases with the percentage of people with the same reaction.
Consistency information refers to how consistently the target individual responds to the stimulus or event on subsequent occasions.
Distinctiveness information measures how consistently the target person responds to various other stimuli or occurrences.
Whether a dispositional or situational attribution is more likely depends on the presence or absence of each category of information separately. Consensus information suggests a situational reason when it is there (i.e., when everyone else is acting in the same manner as the target individual). In contrast, it suggests a dispositional cause when it is absent. Consistency information suggests a dispositional cause when it is there, while its absence suggests a situational cause when it is absent (the target individual consistently behaves similarly). A dispositional cause is implied by the absence of distinctiveness information (the target person behaves consistently across contexts), whereas the presence of distinctiveness information implies a situational cause.
According to Kelley's theory, when consensus and distinctiveness are low but consistency is strong, we are more likely to attribute others' behavior to internal factors. In contrast, when consensus, consistency, and distinctiveness are all high, we are more prone to assume that the other person's behavior results from outside forces. Finally, when consensus is low, but consistency and distinctiveness are high, we typically ascribe others' conduct to a mix of internal and external variables. A specific example may assist show how logical these concepts are.
Let us start by supposing that the following circumstances exist
You notice other servers making advances toward this customer (consensus is strong);
You have observed the same server making advances toward the same client on additional times (consistency is strong); and
You have not observed this server advance toward other clients (distinctiveness is high).
Given the high levels of consensus, consistency, and distinctiveness, you would likely ascribe the clerk's actions to outside factors. For example, the waiter may be flirting with the customer because she is particularly pretty.
Contrarily, suppose that the following circumstances exist
No other servers make advances toward the customer (low level of consensus);
You have observed the same server making advances toward the same client on additional occasions (consistency is strong); and
You have witnessed this server advance toward numerous other clients (distinctiveness is low).
According to Kelley's thesis, you would infer the server's actions from internal factors because a server is just a flirtatious person.
The following are the primary distinctions between Weiner's and Kelley's frameworks. First, as Martinko and Thomson (1998) point out, while Weiner's studies are more focused on how people examine the causes of their conduct, the majority of Kelley's investigations focus on how people attribute causes to the behavior of other people. Second, and more crucially, while Weiner's model emphasizes the outcomes of such causal attribution, Kelley's model is more concerned with the process of attribution (the psychological process explaining causal attribution). According to Kelley, attribution theories are those that concentrate on the act of attributing causes. In contrast, according to Michela, attributional theories concentrate on the results of the attribution process.
| Kelley's Theory | Weiner's Theory |
|---|---|
| It focuses on how people examine the causes of other people's behavior. | It focuses on how people examine the causes of their own behavior. |
| More focused on process of attribution | More focused on the outcomes of causal attribution. |
The concept, however, seems far from being relevant to all situations. People use all three categories of information but use them sparingly. For instance, people pay more attention to information about the target person (about their consistency and distinctiveness) than information about the other people in the setting. Perhaps more crucially, although people do follow these principles and derive causality logically in some situations, they appear to be only in situations where participants have all the facts spelled out clearly and the time to determine a plausible cause in the complex manner outlined above. However, even in cases where some information is lacking (for example, no information on distinctiveness), attributions can still be made. This implies that there are additional methods via which individuals can form these kinds of conclusions.
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