ABSTRACT
Attribution theory addresses questions of how people judge the causes of behaviors or events. Their perceptions of causes-attributions-can refl ect on an individual action or a societal problem; be private or expressed in public; accurate or erroneous; concern one’s own action or that of others; related to the event they witness directly or portrayed by someone else. According to Heider (1958), regarded as the “father” of attribution theory, people go through life as amateur scientists, piecing together information in an effort to make sense of the social and physical world they encounter by assigning causes to them.
