ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the contribution is to place attribution theory in its historical context, to illustrate how it developed from other schools of psychology, and how it relates to them, and tentatively to suggest that some of its ideas are all that new. In order to explain the behaviour of other it may be necessary for self to understand the environment as other believes it to be rather than as self knows it to be. An individual is an object in the social world of other people and as a result of interacting with them he becomes an object to himself he becomes a 'person'. Since the mid-1960s, the study of person perception in particular, and of social psychology in general, has come to be increasingly dominated by attribution theory. In concluding this section we wish to make reference to one other version of behaviourism which is inherently social in form the social behaviourism of Mead.
