ATTRIBUTION THEORYdispositional causes of events. These ratings have
been obtained on ipsative scales as well as on
independent rating scales. Ipsative measures pose
these causes as two poles on one dimension; thus,
an attribution of cause to the actor’s disposition is
also a statement that situational factors are not
causal. This assumed inverse relationship between
situational and dispositional causality has been
rejected on conceptual and empirical grounds. In
more recent studies, therefore, respondents as-
sign each type of causality separately. (Ipsative
measures are appropriate for answering some ques-
tions, however, such as whether the attribution of
cause to one actor comes at the expense of attribu-
tion to another actor or to society.) In theory, then,
both dispositional and situational variables could
be identified as causal factors.
The breadth of these two categories has also
been recognized as a problem. Dispositional causes
may include a wide variety of factors such as stable
traits and attitudes, unstable moods and emotions,
and intentional choices. Situational cause is per-
haps an even broader category. It is quite possible
that these categories are so broad as to render a
single measure of each virtually meaningless. Thus,
researchers often include both general and more
specific, narrower responses as possible choices
(e.g., choices of attributing blame to an assailant or
to the situation might be refined to the assailant’s
use of a weapon, physical size, and psychological
state, on the one hand, and the location, time of
day, and number of people nearby, on the other).
Structured measures of attributions are vul-
nerable to the criticism that the categories of
causes presented to respondents are not those
they use in their everyday attributions. Recogniz-
ing this limitation, a few researchers have used
open-ended measures. Comparative studies of the
relative utility of several different types of meas-
ures of causal attributions conclude that scale
methods perform somewhat better in terms of
their inter-test validity and reliability, although
open-ended measures are preferable when research-
ers are exploring causal attributions in new situa-
tions. Some researchers have attempted to over-
come some of the limitations of existing scales;
Curtis McMillen and Susan Zuravin (1997), for
example, have developed and refined ‘‘Attributions
of Responsibility’’ and ‘‘Blame Scales’’ for use in
clinical research that may be useful for other kinds
of attributional situations.
The great majority of attribution studies use
stimuli of highly limited social meaning. General-
ly, the behavior is represented with a brief written
vignette, often just a single sentence. Some re-
searchers have shifted to the presentation of visual
stimuli, typically with videotaped rather than actu-
al behavioral sequences, in order to ensure
comparability across experimental conditions. Rec-
ognizing the limitations of brief, noncontextualized
stimuli, a few researchers have begun to use a
greater variety of more extended stimuli including
newspaper reports and published short stories.
Most of these stimuli, including the videotaped
behavioral sequences, rely heavily on language to
convey the meaning of behavior. Conceptual at-
tention has turned recently to how attribution
relies on language and to the necessity of consider-
ing explicitly what that reliance means. Some re-
searchers (Anderson and Beattie 1998; Antaki and
Leudar 1992) have attempted to use more natural-
istic approaches, incorporating into the study the
analysis of spontaneous conversations among study
participants.WHEN DO WE MAKE ATTRIBUTIONS?Long after attribution had attained its popularity
in social psychology, a question that perhaps should
have been raised much earlier began to receive
attention: When do we make attributions? To what
extent are the attributions in this large body of
research elicited by the experimental procedures
themselves? This is a question that can be directed
to any form of social cognition. It is particularly
relevant, however, to attribution. Most people,
confronted with a form on which they are to
answer the question ‘‘Why?,’’ do so. There is no
way of knowing, within the typical experimental
paradigm, whether respondents would make
attributions on their own. In a sense there are two
questions: Do people make attributions spontane-
ously, and if they do, under what circumstances do
they do so?In response to the first question, Weiner (1985)
has marshaled impressive evidence that people do
indeed make attributions spontaneously. Inven-
tive procedures have been developed for assessing
the presence of attributional processing that is not
directly elicited. This line of evidence has dealt
almost entirely with causal attributions. Research