Quotes About Attribution

I think it's ill-advised to attribute pathologies to healthy people. It doesn't help normal, healthy, thriving children to be viewed as pitiable and fragile.

People who are in a fortunate position always attribute virtue to what makes them so happy.

In the nineties, the PT had wrongly decided to attribute its electoral failures to its virtues.

Whose fault is it, then? Dennis Compton's (Basil Fawlty)

It seems natural for people to blame their own misfortunes on the environment. It seems equally natural to blame other people's misfortunes on their personalities. Just the opposite attribution, by the way, is made when things go well. When things go right, people credit their own abilities and intelligence. The onlookers do the reverse. When they see things go well for someone else, they sometimes credit the environment, or luck.

El éxito tiene muchos padres, pero el fracaso es huérfano.

Shouldering the blame for failure and conferring credit where it is due comes rarely to most.

Any party which takes credit for the rain must not be surprised if its opponents blame it for the drought.

We deny responsibility for our actions when we attribute their cause to factors outside ourselves:

It's not you. It's them. (No, really. It is.)

Elections, like criminal trials, are ultimately always about assigning blame.

as we age, (1) we take on more responsibilities, so we have a greater cognitive burden, (2) we become more vigilant about threats (especially as parents) and more sensitive to errors in youth ('kids these days!'), (3) while at the same time we lose the capacity to process information as quickly as we did when we were younger, and (4) we tend to attribute these changes in ourselves to changes in the external world.

the fundamental attribution error is the tendency of human beings to attribute the negative or frustrating behaviors of their colleagues to their intentions and personalities, while attributing their own negative or frustrating behaviors to environmental factors.

Blame is something that is shared and denied in equal measures.

Our tendency to attribute our behavior to our context or to blame others for it is directly in contrast to how we tend to judge others' actions. When it comes to other people, we are far more likely to attribute the bad meal to their inability to cook rather than to other causes. This is called the fundamental attribution error.

When confronted with their fruitless ways, binge writers often proffer a self-defeating dispositional attribution: "I'm just not the kind of person who's good at making a schedule and sticking to it." This is nonsense, of course. People like dispositional explanations when they don't want to change [...]

For success everything must go right, but by contrast, failure can be attributed to any number of external causes