ABSTRACT
The term attribution is common in our everyday social vocabularies. We think and we talk about things that happened in our personal or social worlds, identifying our best guesses (our attributions) for why those events or behaviors happened as they did and who or what is responsible for them. We also try to understand others and their actions-as well as our behaviors and ourselves-by figuring out what could have motivated or contributed to a particular behavior. These attempts to understand behavior, as reflected in our thoughts and talk, we often call attributions. Attributions in this everyday sense involve the inferences, assumptions, beliefs, and other explanatory forms that frequent our thoughts and our talk (Burleson, 1996; Hilton, 1990); they are our commonplace efforts to understand what underlies our own and others’ actions.
