"Attribution theory concerns the process by which an individual interprets events "as being caused by particular parts of the relatively stable environment" . Consideration of attribution theory is relevant for a symposium on motivation in several respects. The theory describes processes that operate as if the individual were motivated to attain a cognitive mastery of the causal structure of his environment."

“My purpose in this paper is to highlight some of the central ideas contained in Heider's theory, to present them in a systematic way, and to show their relevance to developments in several central fields of contemporary social psychology.”

“PRIMACY The general notion here is that a person scans and interprets a sequence of information until he attains an attribution from it and then disregards later information or assimilates it to his earlier impression.”

“Am I to take my enjoyment of a movie as a basis for an attribution to the movie or for an attribution to myself ? The inference as to where to locate the dispositional properties responsible for the effect is made by interpreting the raw data in the context of subsidiary information from experiment-like variations of conditions.”

“is probably associated with assumptions that there is a distribution of opinion toward the task, and only the more favorable subjects complied in the $1 case and almost all, favorable or not, complied in the $20 case.”

“The last decade has seen a great deal of research on the perception of causation and the consequences of such perception. Conducted primarily within social psychology, the focus has been the perceived causes of other persons' behavior. A parallel analysis has been made of the perceived causes of one's own behavior, and the liveliest recent topic has concerned differences between other-perception and self-perception. The study of perceived causation is identified by the term "attribution theory," attribution referring to the perception inference of cause. As we will see, there is not one but many attribution "theories" and the term refers to several different kinds of problem. The common ideas are that people interpret behavior in terms of its causes and that these interpretations play an important role in determining reactions to the behavior.”

“Attributional research shows that attributions affect our feelings about past events and our expectations about future ones, our attitudes toward other persons and our reactions to their behavior, and our conceptions of ourselves and our efforts to improve our fortunes.”