ATTRIBUTION THEORYcouples, thus ultimately influencing marital satis-
faction. Attributions also play an important role in
relationship dissolution. Attributions are a critical
part of the detailed accounts people provide for
the dissolution of their relationships, and these
accounts go beyond explanation to rationalize and
justify the loss of relationships.
Research on interpersonal attribution extends
the intrapersonal approach in several ways. When
people who interact have substantial knowledge of
and feelings about each other, the attribution
process involves evaluation as well as cognition.
Issues of communication, and hence potential
changes in preexisting attributions for recurrent
relationship events, also become salient at the
interpersonal level. There is very little research on
how attributions change through interaction and
relationships, but this is clearly a significant topic.
Attributions at the interpersonal level also entail
greater concern with accountability for action;
causality at this level also raises issues of justification.
Intergroup attribution. Intergroup attribution
refers to the ways in which members of different
social groups explain the behavior of members of
their own and other social groups. At this level,
social categorization has a direct impact on attri-
bution. Studies using a variety of subjects from
different social groups and often different coun-
tries show consistent support for an ingroup-serv-
ing attributional pattern, for example, a tendency
toward more dispositional attributions for posi-
tive as opposed to negative behavior for ingroup
actors. The evidence for the converse pattern,
more dispositional attributions for negative as
opposed to positive behavior for outgroup actors,
is not as strong. (Moreover, these patterns are
stronger in dominant than in dominated groups.)
Social desirability biases can counteract this pat-
tern; Steven Little, Robert Sterling, and Daniel
Tingstrom (1996), for example, found that white
respondents held black actors less responsible for
participating in a bar fight than did black respon-
dents. The authors suggest that this finding may be
due to the desire of the white sample—under-
graduates from a suburban area—to appear racial-
ly progressive.
Parallel studies of a group’s success and failure
show a consistent pattern of ingroup protection.
Outgroup failure is attributed more to lack of
ability than is ingroup failure. Effects of group
membership on attributions about success are not
as strong. Interestingly, there is also some evi-
dence of outgroup-favoring and/or ingroup-dero-
gating attributions among widely recognized low-
er-status, dominated groups such as migrant labor
populations (Hewstone 1989). A third form of
evidence of intergroup attribution is provided by
studies of attributions about social positions occu-
pied by existing groups. In general, these studies,
like those cited above, show higher ratings of
ingroup-serving as opposed to outgroup-serving
attributions.Societal attribution. At the societal level, those
beliefs shared by the members of a given society
form the vocabulary for social attributions. The
concept of social representations, which has its
origins in Durkheim’s concept of ‘‘representation
collectives,’’ was developed by Serge Moscovici
(1976) to represent how knowledge is shared by
societal members in the form of common-sense
theories about that society. Social representations
are intimately connected to the process of attribu-
tion. Not only are explanation and accountability
part of a system of collective representations, but
such representations determine when we seek ex-
planations. Social representations serve as catego-
ries that influence the perception and processing
of social information; moreover, they underscore
the emphasis on shared social beliefs and knowl-
edge. Social representations are useful in inter-
preting research on laypersons’ explanations of
societal events such as poverty and wealth, unem-
ployment, and racial inequality. Poverty tends to
be attributed to individualistic factors, for exam-
ple, whereas unemployment tends to be attributed
to societal factors. Not surprisingly, these patterns
may be qualified by attributors’ own class back-
grounds; although middle-class people attribute
poverty more often to internal factors, those who
are themselves poor attribute poverty more often
to external factors such as governmental policies
(Singh 1989). Gender and racial stereotyping can
also shape attributions. Cynthia Willis, Marianne
Hallinan, and Jeffrey Melby (1996), for example,
found that respondents with a traditional sex-role
orientation showed a favorable bias toward the
male perpetrator in domestic violence situations.
When the female victim was African American and
married, both egalitarians and traditionalists were
less likely to attribute blame to the man.