CAUSAL ATTRIBUTION AS PROCESS: THE DIALECTICS OF SOCIAL EXPLANATION

The present thesis focused on attribution theory in social psychology. Attributions were treated as moments of a wider dialectical process of social explanation in which the human subject juxtaposes complementary and/or contradictory causal, and non-causal factors in an attempt to arrive at a meaningful explanation of social events.;Results indicated the following: (1) The subjects' categorizations of the situations were placed on two cognitive dimensions and interpreted as accidents, coincidences, actions, and occurrences. (2) Coincidences and occurrences received a primarily situational attribution whereas actions and accidents a primarily dispositional attribution. (3) The degree of contribution of both internal and external factors was shown to be a function of the kind of situation analyzed and the subjects' degree of dialectical thinking. (4) The dialectical subjects' decisionary process involved an active interplay of both internal and external factors through which both their attributions and interpretations of the situations were continuously transformed.;In conclusion, attributions were established as open, developmental, and transformative moments of a dynamic process of social explanation, rather than as static, cognitive principles of representing reality.;Four basic hypotheses were raised: (1) that the subjects' conceptual categorizations of different 'hypothetical' situations in causal, non-causal terms would be placed and juxtaposed within a multidimensional cognitive space; (2) that this conceptual categorization would influence their subsequent attributions as to the outcome of the situations; (3) that both internal (dispositional) and external (situational) factors would simultaneously be used as explanations for the same situation; and (4) that these factors would be juxtaposed and transformed in a dialectical process underlying the making of attributions and exemplified in the subjects' decisionary process.