The Proportionality Principle of Attribution

Paper Summary:

This paper describes a study which investigated attribution, specifically the proportionality principle, in 185 undergraduate students. Participants were divided into several conditions and completed questionnaires that tested; that the outcome of a scenario was appropriately rated, that the magnitude of the outcome determined the likelihood to which the cause of the event was attributed to predictable or unpredictable causes, and the extent to which personality characteristics (belief in a just world and locus of control) affected behavior in accordance to the proportionality principle. It was hypothesized that the level of the two personality characteristics being tested would have a significant effect on behavior, that the scenarios and magnitudes were designed appropriately, and that the magnitude of the outcome predicted how the participants would explain the event. It was found that the magnitudes of the outcomes supported our hypothesis and were successfully manipulated but that personality characteristics did not have as much of an effect on ratings as was originally proposed. These results were attributed to participants' level of cognitive satisfaction as well as typical human tendencies in logic and reasoning.

From the Paper:

"Social psychologists are largely interested in how humans explain the causation of a behavior or an event. Making a judgment on behavior is essentially making a claim as to the causation of the behavior and this is commonly known as making an attribution. Heider (1958), who was the first to officially propose the idea of a person bias, suggested that humans attribute most behavior to personality rather than to situational causes. The person bias, now known as the fundamental attribution error, is both a useful and harmful characteristic of humans; it allows for easy formation of a mental model of an individual's personality to occur. Often, however, during the formation of this model, situational causes are ignored, and negative characteristics are attributed wrongfully to an individual's personality when in fact, the exhibited behavior was more a product of the environmental circumstances. A more recent, and less researched proposal involving attribution is the proportionality principle. This suggests that humans have the tendency to seek explanations for behavior or events that are equal in magnitude to the outcome of the event, even if this is not the most logical explanation. For example, McCauley and Jacques (1979) found that important events with drastic outcomes, such as presidential assassinations are attributed for causes equally as important or drastic."

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