"SALIENCE The notion here is that an effect is attributed to the cause that is most salient in the perceptual field at the time the effect is observed."

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”