Harold Kelley

Solutions require thinking through a series of interrelated steps or stages, analyzing a number of rules at each point, and always keeping in mind conclusions reached at earlier points.

— Harold Kelley

My purpose in this paper is to highlight some of the central ideas contained in Heider's theory, to present them in a systematic way, and to show their relevance to developments in several central fields of contemporary social psychology.

— Harold Kelley

Attribution theory concerns the process by which an individual interprets events "as being caused by particular parts of the relatively stable environment" (Heider, p. 297). Consideration of attribution theory is relevant for a symposium on motivation in several respects. The theory describes processes that operate as if the individual were motivated to attain a cognitive mastery of the causal structure of his environment.

— Harold Kelley

Am I to take my enjoyment of a movie as a basis for an attribution to the movie (that it is intrinsically enjoyable) or for an attribution to myself (that I have a specific kind of desire relevant to movies)? The inference as to where to locate the dispositional properties responsible for the effect is made by interpreting the raw data (the enjoyment) in the context of subsidiary information from experiment-like variations of conditions.

— Harold Kelley

[Kelley argued that OS's judgment of an inverse relation between inducement magnitude and attitude inference] is probably associated with assumptions (unchecked in Bern’s work, as far as I know) that there is a distribution of opinion toward the task, and only the more favorable subjects complied in the $1 case and almost all, favorable or not, complied in the $20 case.

— Harold Kelley

A person is known by the behavior he displays consistently. An experiment by Himmelfarb (1972) makes the important point that consistency in other persons' characterizations of an actor carries more weight if they are based on observations in dissimilar rather than similar situations. The other side of the coin is that a person's inconsistent behavior is attributed not to him but to circumstances.

— Harold Kelley

SALIENCE The notion here is that an effect is attributed to the cause that is most salient in the perceptual field at the time the effect is observed.

— Harold Kelley

PRIMACY The general notion here is that a person scans and interprets a sequence of information until he attains an attribution from it and then disregards later information or assimilates it to his earlier impression.

— Harold Kelley

Attributional research shows that attributions affect our feelings about past events and our expectations about future ones, our attitudes toward other persons and our reactions to their behavior, and our conceptions of ourselves and our efforts to improve our fortunes.

— Harold Kelley