ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with what we know about our journey to answer those "Why?" questions: causal attributions. Causal attributions are defined as the creation of a causal inference; that is, a person's judgment about what may have produced a particular outcome or behavior. They are an integral part of functioning in the social world, because it is presumed that we must know the causal origins of someone's behavior in order to truly understand him/her. Many attribution theorists categorize the end product of the causal search as yielding either an internal/dispositional attribution or an external/situational attribution. F. Heider introduced his ideas about naïve psychology during a time in our discipline's history that shunned subjectivity. While many other psychologists were adopting a strictly behavioral approach to studying psychological science, Heider acknowledged a role for cognition and subjective experience in explaining human behavior.
