Theoretical Construction and Empirical Research on Attribution Orientation

Abstract

From Heider's proposed attribution theory in 1958 until now, attribution theory is a hot spot of social psychology all the time. In the history of attribution theory studies, numerous attribution theories have been proposed, and the most representative and widely-influenced attribution theories include: Heider's two-dimensional theory; Keller's variance analysis theory; Rotter's control point theory, etc. Above- mentioned theories have the following characteristics: That pay great attention to details, but there is not enough stress on the human psychology's total perspective. This paper tries to use a new angle of view-orientation research to deal with the previous attribution theory research, and to construct an attribution orientation theory which is combined with social situation more closely and more generally. The presumptive model of attribution orientation theory has four dimensions: social orientation, individual orientation, active orientation and negative orientation. According to the above-mentioned construction, we formed our attribution orientation scale. In ShenZhen, our evaluators rate 1301 subjects with the attribution orientation scale, Dealing with data by exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis method. Results showed the existence of such a theoretical construction. In attribution orientation's theoretical construction, factors load and fitting index of each dimension is good, and attribution orientation scale had good reliability and construction validity. At the beginning of attribution orientation's theory construction, theory supposition was set to 4 orientation dimensions respectively independence. This supposition has obtained the support of EFA CFA result and the correlation analysis result. Through the subscales score's operation, we expanded the application space of attribution orientation scale. This scale estimated that this scale is estimated to produce obvious application value in social psychology and management psychology domain, such as talent selection, talent appointment, talent evaluation, talent supervision, career planning, individual psychological healthy and the social adaptation. After inspecting the relationship between Attribution orientation dimensions and 8 social psychological variables, the following characters of four attribution orientation dimensions have been confirmed: generalizability, stability and effectiveness for evaluation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)