Background
Psychological research into attribution began with the work of Fritz Heider during the early years of the 20th century. In his 1920's dissertation Heider addressed a fundamental problem of phenomenology; why do perceivers attribute the properties of an object they sense, such as its color, texture and so on, to the object itself when those properties exist only in their minds? Heider's answer was to consider the object being perceived and the physical media by which it is sensed – the ticking of a watch causing vibrations in the air for instance – to be quite distinct, and that what the perceiver's senses do is to reconstruct an object from its effect on the media, a process he called attribution. "Perceivers faced with sensory data thus see the perceptual object as 'out there', because they attribute the sensory data to their underlying causes in the world."
Heider subsequently extended his ideas to the question of how people perceive each other, and in particular how they account for each other's behavior, person perception. Motives played an important role in Heider's model: "motives, intentions, sentiments ... the core processes which manifest themselves in overt behavior". Heider distinguished between personal causality – such as offering someone a drink – and impersonal causality such as sneezing, or leaves falling. Later attribution theorists have tended to see Heider's fundamental distinction as being between "person (or internal) causes and situation (or external) causes of behavior.
Read more about this topic: Attribution (psychology)
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