Understanding political and social perception through attribution theory

By Dr. Y. Ratnayake, former senior consultant at the Sri Lanka Institute of Development Administration

The focal objective of this succinct article is to review the different facets of attribution theory in a nutshell and its usefulness in understanding political and individual opinion formation, mainly in Sri Lanka, where most people are evidently far from objectivity or neutrality in making judgements.

In the last paragraphs of the article, a contrast has been made between the ways of opinion formation and the pattern of social media behaviour in Sri Lanka before and after the recently concluded presidential election, which, as a whole, demonstrates how information is twisted and oxymoron arguments are brought forward for justifying the writers’ views, providing live evidence to prove how attribution theory works.

The trajectory of opinion formation and assigning the causal relationship related to political or any other issue is not contingent, as evidence proves, on the factuality or objectivity criteria but rather dominated by the attitude of the opinion maker and his relative positioning on the continuum of favorability and unfavorability towards an object, person or social issue as postulated by the attribution theory.

In this context, the attribution theory simply seeks to explain how and why people form political affiliations based on their perception of the cause-and-effect relationship of important social issues. If attitudes towards a person are unfavourable, then what goes wrong with the actions of a person is attributed to the person's incapability and inefficiency, and at the same time, if a person is viewed through favourable attitudes, then all the blunders and boondoggles caused by such a person are attributed to the influence of circumstances, the attribution theory postulates, so that the person is exonerated forthwith from the responsibility for any wrongdoing committed as he is in good books with the observer.

As ontology on the subject expounds, an attribution can best be defined as the causes that are assigned for a given circumstance as perceived by an observer of the situation. Since reasons attributed to a given situation by different individuals vary, society tends to divide itself into social or political groups consisting of people whose perception of cause-and-effect relationships is homogeneous.

A terse glimpse of the theoretical background reveals that Weiner (1986) posited that there are four dimensions involved in making attributions regarding causality:

1.         internality (i.e., the perceived source of the cause, whether internal or external),

2.         stability (i.e., whether the cause is perceived to be permanent or transient),

3.         controllability (i.e., whether the cause is perceived to be controllable or not), and

4.         globality (i.e., whether the cause is perceived to affect many other situations or not).

Heider’s Attribution Theory

A study by Heider & Simmel (1944) first demonstrated how individuals are predisposed to attribute personality traits even to inanimate objects such as shapes and colours. The study involved two groups when watching a video where shapes ‘interacted’—one’ group was asked to describe what occurred when watching a video, and the other was asked for their interpretations of their movements. Viewers often assumed that the characters were associated with emotions, motivations and purposes.

Fritz Heider theorised that people tend to see cause-and-effect relationships even when there isn’t a relationship. Simply stated, individuals impose almost a narrative into assigning a cause to one’s behaviour.

From this, he proposed two types of attributions:

1.         Internal, dispositional attributions—individuals assign the cause of one’s behaviour to internal, stable characteristics such as their personality traits or their values and beliefs.

2.         External, situational attributions—assigning the cause of one’s behaviour to external influences such as an environmental event or situation out of one’s control, rather than to their personality.

Fundamental Attribution Error

This is described as “the tendency to believe that what people do reflects who they are.”

Heider refers to this as a bias where the behaviour of others is taken at face value rather than considering the specific circumstances that influence one’s behaviour. It is a tendency to internally attribute the behaviour of another person rather than attribute it to situational circumstances.

For example, if a person was late to class, s/he would make an external attribution using the underlying situational circumstances known to the person, real or fake, behind the particular behaviour, such as your car not starting or the bus breaking down on the way. However, observing another classmate being late to class may, and most likely, would cause you to propose an internal attribution such as that he is a disorganised person despite not knowing the circumstances behind the person being  late.

Self-serving bias:

Another psychological phenomenon in making attributions is the behaviour in which individuals tend to attribute their own successes to internal, dispositional factors, but their failures to external, situational influences. It often happens for want of maintaining self-esteem. For example, one tends to attribute getting a high grade on a test to being smart but failing a test to a bad teacher.

Errors in Attribution

There are three other effects that may contribute towards errors in attribution:

1.         The false-consensus effect. That is the tendency to believe that your viewpoint is the consensus among most people, that your views are considered normal across the population.

2.         Actor-observer bias. That occurs when individuals create different reasons for the same event.

3.         The just world hypothesis. This refers to the tendency of believing that people receive what they deserve.

Kelley’s Co-variation Model:

Harold Kelley, an American psychologist, developed a model expounding that people instrumentalise three types of information when making efforts to attribute an individual’s behaviour. The term ‘co-variation’ refers to a person having information from observations that occurred at different times and in varied situations. From these

observations, individuals can perceive correlated cause and effect relationships.

Three types of reasoning can be seen in support of contributing to causal explanations:

1.         Consensus: whether other people act in the same way in a similar situation.

2.         Distinctiveness: whether the person acts in the same way in different situations.

3.         Consistency: whether the person acts the same when the situation appears again.

Attribution Theory in Sri Lankan Politics

The validity of the attribution theory in understanding mass and individual behaviours can be examined using empirical circumstances that took place in many countries, including a recent development that was experienced in Sri Lanka as related to the political arena.

Political comments appearing in social media and expressed on public platforms in the periods pre- and post-presidential election, concluded a few moons ago, provide an interesting contrast on how opinions have swayed depending on commentators’ perception based on their value proposition regarding the newly elected government.

If one examines reels of writing on social media during the eve of the presidential election, one may find that social media was fully decorated in jaw-dropping details as to how Alice’s Wonderland would prosper in the post-election period due to the magical power and the charisma of the leader that would conquer the political throne of the country. Furthermore, the economic woes and backwardness that country experienced up to November 2024 were the outcome of political mismanagement of the governments that governed the country after independence in 1948, a period of curse if critics’ wordings are cited.

Within a few months after November 2024, the people who were singing a eulogy on the merits of the incoming government have turned 360 degrees and started inventing excuses for the lacklustre performance of the new government, stating that the new regime does not possess a magic wand and the commodity shortages and other economic woes experienced under the brand-new regime are the result of climatic and other prevailing circumstances that no political regime can vanquish. In short, the naysayers of the past regimes as well as the trumpet players for the incoming government in the social media and tabloids became the excuse managers overnight, which, in general, illustrates the influence of personal opinions on the formation of perceptual landscapes pertaining to politics and any other issues of social significance.

Attribution Theory in Individual Judgement

In personal life, opinion formation of individuals is heavily influenced, on one hand, by the favourable or unfavourable attitudes possessed by the opinion maker towards others and, on the other hand, by the relationship status, perhaps kinship, one holds with the other person. Suppose a person observes an individual, say a total stranger, who coughs aloud, which may be interpreted as a symptom of covid, but if the person coughing is related to the observer, say the observer’s father, the observer may state that the coughing is due to the inhaling of polluted air!

Everywhere what can be found is the use of normative criteria for assigning causal relationships rather than the positive norm where the norm is adjusted in the mould of attitude for the purpose of maliciously attributing the cause-and-effect relationship according to one’s fancies. This particular behaviour is somewhat akin to the Sinhala maxim, which states that the shadow of an unfavourable individual is also kinky, though the person does not in fact have a kink!

History teaches us that history does not teach us—Friedrich Hegel.