Attribution

Attribution is also a psychological concept. When people watch the world, they do not see it as a completely random stream of happenings, but tend to attribute meanings to things. So, for example when you see someone fall over, you can attribute this to a stable trait ("clumsiness"), or to a feature of the situation ("banana peel on the floor"), or to random chance ("just one of those crazy flukes"). There are a number of theories about the orderly ways in which people make these attributions (see attribution theory), and there are a number of well documented quirks in the way people make them (see attributional bias, and fundamental attribution error).

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