Part - I

You asked Pooja, a classmate of yours, to lend you her notes for the Economic Analysis course and she refused. Mr. Goel asked his twelve-year-old son to stop watching TV. Much to your unpleasant surprise, you learned that you have got a D-grade in Marketing when you were expecting at least a B+.

Almost invariably the question that would arise in your mind in each of these situations is why did Pooja not lend you her notes? Why did Mr. Goel ask his son to stop watching TV? Why didn't you get the expected grade in the Marketing course? In various life situations, of which no one has kept count of, we want to know why other people have acted the way they have, why events have turned out in a particular way. In most situations, each one of us has some explanation or the other for the occurrences of events in our lives.

Why do we often have to figure out and explain what caused what? There appears to be two strong motives in all human beings: the need to make sense of and form a coherent understanding of the world around us, and the need to control the environment (proposed by social psychologist, Fritz Heider, 1958). One of the essentials for satisfying these motives is the ability to predict how others are going to behave. Failure to do so will render our world random, chaotic, and incoherent. For example, we would not know whether to expect reward or punishment for our work performance. Similarly, if we can adequately predict others' behavior, we can hope to control our environment satisfactorily by adjusting our actions accordingly. Since the number of specific causes behind others' behavior is large - too large - our search for explanation of others' behavior becomes a complex affair.

The process through which we attempt to get information to explain other people's behavior is known as attribution. Everyone, not just psychologists, uses certain rules to infer the causes of observed behavior or occurrences of events in their lives. As a result, each ordinary person holds a general theory of human behavior, which Heider called naive psychology.

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* Contributed by -
Renu Misra,
Masters in Psychology (Univ. of Allahabad),
PGDHRM (Pondicherry Univ.),
Manager Placements-IMT Ghaziabad.