Individuals and organizations (3)-Introduction to three attribution theories

In individuals and organizations, self-improvement and adjustment of individuals are very important. In the process, the part of self-cognition is the foundation. This involves a cross-disciplinary "Social Psychology ", social psychology is a subject between psychology and society that studies the relationship between a person and society. From the perspective of psychology, it is a branch of psychology, which can be regarded as "Social Psychology". From the perspective of social psychology, it can be regarded as "Individual Society" or "Psychological Society ".
I think there are many theoretical theories in the field of psychology that can guide our thinking process.

I. Wei Na's attribution Effect Theory

The American psychologist Bernard Weiner (1974), centered on the cognitive components of successful behaviors, proposed an attribution model. He believes that the individual's explanation of success or failure is similar to the following four factors: (1) ability; (2) effort; (3) difficulty of the task; (4) luck. The ability and effort are the "internal reasons" for describing personal characteristics; the difficulty and luck are the "external reasons" for environmental factors ". Wena also divided the four reasons based on the "stability" dimension: capacity and Task Difficulty are stable factors; effort and luck are unstable, it has changed a lot in various situations. He believes that "internal and external control points" (internal and external factors) and "stability" are mutually independent and play different roles on the generation and quality of a person's achievement motivation. The "stability" dimension has a significant impact on the expectations or predictions of future success in similar situations. If a person owes success in a task to stability, such as being competent or easy for him, he naturally expects that he will continue to succeed in similar situations in the future. If the success is attributed to the unstable reasons that change as the situation changes, such as hard work or good luck, it is obvious that you are not so confident about the next success. On the contrary, for failures in a task, if it is attributed to a stable cause that is difficult for individuals to change, such as poor ability or difficult tasks, it is clear that similar tasks will also attempt to fail in the future. If the failure is attributed to the cause of instability, such as bad luck or insufficient efforts, it will have higher expectations for future success.

What is the role of the control point? Werner believes that the internal control or out-of-control judgment of achievement behavior affects this behavior as "value" for individuals, and thus affects their achievement motivation. People pay more attention to internal successes and reward themselves. If you get a good score in the exam, you will feel happy and continue to strive for success if it is attributed to your ability or effort, rather than luck or questions that are too easy for these external reasons. Failure due to internal reasons will negatively affect personal self-esteem and weaken future pursuit of success; otherwise, failure due to external reasons will not. If we believe that we do not have a good score in a course because we do not have the talent in this area, even if we redouble our efforts, we may suddenly feel that this course is not so important, and no longer work on it. However, if you think that the score is not good because the exam is too difficult or the questions are too biased, it will not affect your self-feeling, nor reduce the value of this course or your future efforts. The following is Weena's Achievement Attribution Theory: From the above introduction, we can see that Weena's attribution effect theory is actually a theory about the expectations and values of achievement. That is, control points affect the value that people give to success or failure, while attribution stability affects achievement expectations. Value and expectation jointly determine the pursuit of people in future achievements. His theory is a huge step forward from the crentor, which once played an important role in the Achievement Attribution Theory. From the two dimensions of stability and control points, Werner explains the motives and behaviors of achievement. This is a comprehensive and objective analysis of the development of Achievement Attribution Theory, and many practical research materials prove this.

Ii. Attribution Theory of Self-Efficacy

The self-efficacy theory was first proposed by American psychologist banula (A. Bandura, 1977), and then developed into the current Attribution Theory of self-efficacy by cognitive psychologists. Bantula's theory of self-efficacy is centered on the idea that an individual's self-efficacy determines his behavioral motivation in an achievement situation. People with high self-efficacy are highly motivated to take actions in related activities. They are willing to make efforts and adopt strategies to cope with problems and solve the difficulties they face. When problems and difficulties are solved and overcome, his original sense of efficacy is confirmed, which maintains motivation. That is, when an individual occasionally encounters unprecedented difficulties, his confidence in the ability to succeed also helps overcome the negative aspects of previous operations and induce engine behavior. On the contrary, people with low self-efficacy have low enthusiasm for going up in related activities, and are unwilling to make too much effort and adopt appropriate strategies to cope with difficulties and solve problems, this will inevitably lead to unsatisfactory activities, which in turn reduces his sense of efficacy.

So where is the sense of self-efficacy that is so important to stimulate and maintain achievement motivation? Bantula believes that it is derived from "unconditional positive attention" or reinforcement of behavior. When a person's behavior is always successful and concerned and supported by others, his self-efficacy will be enhanced or improved; however, when a person's behavior is always accompanied by failure and criticism from others, his self-efficacy will weaken or decrease. Indeed, this theory of bantula can explain certain behaviors in a certain scope and level, because the perception of personal abilities is largely influenced by the people around them, especially the influence of important people on their comments, although individuals may not be aware of this. However, just like other behavioral motivation theories, it can only explain why people's behavioral motivation is enhanced when previous behaviors reach their goals or are encouraged, but it is hard to explain why in many cases, people's behaviors that fail to reach their goals or are accused increase their subsequent motives. Therefore, they seem simple and cannot explain the complexity of human behaviors.

It is precisely because of the above shortcomings that people try to study self-efficacy and its impact on achievement motivation and behavior from the perspective of cognition. Therefore, attribution is naturally introduced to the research in this field. Recent researchers have pointed out that people's sense of self-efficacy is not only determined by the results of previous activities and the comments of others. To a large extent, it is determined by the attribution of the results of previous activities and the comments of others. A person has a high degree of self-consciousness and rationality, as well as self-evaluation and self-adjustment ability. reinforcement does not play a role in any behavior of a person; people usually do not look at and evaluate themselves in the way others think or evaluate themselves, or overestimate or underestimate their abilities without analysis due to the success or failure of several activities. With the end of a behavior, people tend to consciously infer the cause of their own success or failure. An individual will have a high sense of self-efficacy only when the success is attributed to the internal and stable factors of outstanding ability. Similarly, an individual has a low sense of self-efficacy only when the failure is attributed to an internal and stable factor of insufficient ability. The success or failure of an individual's external and unstable factors, such as luck and opportunity, is not enough to shake or change his sense of self-efficacy, regardless of what others think.

At present, it has become the consensus of researchers in this field to use attribution as an important cognitive process as the basis for the generation and change of self-efficacy. Therefore, attribution has become the focus of research in this field. The author believes that all human behaviors are the result of subjective and objective interactions. In the process of self-efficacy, maintenance, enhancement, and weakening or disappearing, positive external attention and reinforcement play a certain role, especially in the Achievement Motivation and behavior of preschool children, early and mid-school children, because their values are in an unformed or preliminary stage. However, for people whose personality tends to mature or have basic stereotypes, attribution plays a decisive role in the generation, maintenance, enhancement, weakening, and disappearance of their self-efficacy, therefore, it plays a decisive role in achievement motivation and achievement behavior.

Iii. Learned helpless Attribution Theory

The concept of Learned Helplessness was first proposed by animal learning theories (overmier and Seligman, 1967; Seligman and Maier, 1967. They found that when animals (dogs, rats, and so on) were placed in an area that was hard to escape, they initially attempted to escape the electric shock. However, 24 hours later, their escape response is obviously reduced or disappeared, manifested as lack of motivation, lack of cognition or association, and lack of emotion. They call this phenomenon "Learned Helplessness ", it is believed that this learned helplessness was produced because animals learned their reactions and results (electric shock) are independent and independent from each other during endless electric shock processes. No matter what kind of reaction they make, this acquired helplessness is diffuse and can spread to new situations. After the concept of helplessness was introduced, it soon attracted people's interest and was introduced to study similar human behaviors. Among them, m · E · P · Seligman is the first author of the theory of helpless attribution. He believes that negative behavior events or results do not necessarily generate a sense of helplessness. Only when such events or results are perceived as being difficult to control or change by the individual, can they generate a sense of helplessness. The model created by him is: uncontrollable events-expectations that do not depend on the outcome-weakening of the response intensity. Obviously, srigman believes that only when negative behavior events and results are attributed to uncontrollable reasons can the human being be helpless. However, subsequent studies show that this interpretation of the conditions for the emergence of a sense of helplessness is too simple and difficult to fundamentally explain the complexity of a sense of helplessness because it is directly derived from the analogy of animal research. Because researchers have found that there is not always a lack of motivation in the study of helpless human behavior. Although helpless subjects do not quickly learn positive responses, this is not because they have no motivation to make effective responses; people sometimes experience uncontrollable negative events or results without reducing or weakening the response, but increasing the subsequent response strength; the helpless phenomena produced in human trials seem to be confined to specific activities and tasks and not diffuse and spread to other activities as srigman predicted; it is unnecessary to use the hypothetical response-the belief that results are not mutually dependent as a prerequisite for a sense of helplessness in the face of uncontrollable negative events. Some researchers have pointed out that the belief or expectation of trying to make a response to a person in the sense of helplessness studies conducted by human subjects is hard to achieve.

Later, the psychologist l y Abramson (1978) explicitly introduced the concept and principle of attribution when describing human behavior with the theory of learned helplessness, therefore, the theory of helpless attribution is developed. He pointed out that only uncontrollable perception of negative events or the causes of such events is not enough to make a highly rational and complex animal, such as humans, generate a diffuse sense of helplessness. What determines the nature and extent of a person's lack of motivation after going through uncontrollable negative events is his more complex attribution of the results. If a person owes uncontrollable negative events to internal, stable, and universal factors, a diffuse helplessness or depression will occur, and self-evaluation will decrease, the motivation is also reduced to the lowest level; otherwise, the sense of helplessness generated after people experience negative events can only be restricted by specific time and space conditions, not universal, not enough to reduce people's self-evaluation and weaken people's motivation, it even strengthens the motivation for subsequent behaviors. That is to say, the controllability and location, stability, and universality of the cause of a negative event determine the generation of a sense of helplessness and the subsequent motivation, rather than acting independently. From this we can see that, while explaining the cause of the sense of helplessness, Abramson sees both the Internal Control Factors of the subject and the stability and universality factors. In fact, later studies have proved his theory. Carol Dweck, an American psychologist, and her colleagues studied in detail the attribution types of children's achievements and their impact on future achievements. She believes that children's learning helplessness is caused by improper attribution of failure. Du Yike (1978) found that there were stable individual differences in children's responses to failures. Some children show a "Targeted grasp" that attributed failures to unstable factors, especially insufficient efforts, and persisted for a longer period of time and achieved better results in subsequent tasks. On the contrary, the failure was attributed to a stable internal cause, such as a lack of capacity for children, with little effort and significant reduction in performance in subsequent achievement tasks. Many of them simply give up their efforts in the face of failure, and can't even solve problems that can be easily solved not long ago. She believes that these children are showing a "sense of inaccessibility" and points out that if the failure is attributed to a lack of ability for children to be extremely difficult to change, there is no need to try to solve the same or similar problems. Therefore, children simply give up the effort that does not help. Du Yike also found that teachers' evaluation of students plays an important role in the formation of "grasping orientation" or "Helpless targeting. If a teacher appreciates a child's ability to succeed, stresses his or her carelessness, hard work, and other non-intellectual Factors in case of failure, the child will surely be smart, I believe that they will do better as long as they work harder, so that they will have a positive and constructive attitude towards their own outstanding performance in their long-term studies.