Attributional Style
Attributional style (or explanatory style) is a concept introduced by Lyn Yvonne Abramson, Martin Seligman and John D. Teasdale; Buchanan and Seligman (1995) have edited a book-length review of the topic. This concept goes a stage further than Weiner, stating that in addition to the concepts of internality-externality and stability a dimension of globality-specificity is also needed. Abramson et al. believed that how people explained successes and failures in their lives related to whether they attributed these to internal or external factors, short-term or long-term factors, and factors that affected all situations.
The topic of attribution theory (introduced to psychology by Fritz Heider) has had an influence on locus-of-control theory, but differences exist between the history of these two models. Attribution theorists have been (largely speaking) social psychologists (concerned with the general processes characterizing how and why people make the attributions they do), whereas locus-of-control theorists have been more concerned with individual differences.
Significant to the history of both approaches were the contributions made by Bernard Weiner in the 1970s. Before this time, attribution theorists and locus-of-control theorists had been largely concerned with divisions into external and internal loci of causality. Weiner added the dimension of stability-instability (and later controllability), indicating how a cause could be perceived as having been internal to a person yet still beyond the person's control. The stability dimension added to the understanding of why people succeed or fail after such outcomes. Although not part of Weiner's model, a further dimension of attribution was added by Abramson, Seligman and Teasdale (globality-specificity).
Read more about this topic: Locus Of Control
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