19 - Social dimensions of attribution

Summary

Attribution theory should be made more social. Socially shared patterns of individual thought, feeling and behaviour are the building blocks for any more social approach and these are essentially different from the individualistic phenomena which underlie many traditional theories in social psychology. Study of these collective representations has, furthermore, been a European undertaking and one which the present chapter will attempt to transpose to the field of attribution theory.

The study of collective representations grows out of Durkheim's (1898) notion of représentations collectives and, as its name suggests, is concerned with more social forms of cognition. Lukes (1975), in his critical study of Durkheim, elucidates in which ways this sort of representation is collective:

in its origins … in its reference or object … [and] in being common to the members of a society or group … Durkheim wanted to say both that représentations collectives are socially generated and that they refer to, and are in some sense ‘about’, society.

(Lukes 1975: 7)

These social representations, it may be argued, constitute a more pertinent cognitive basis for social psychology than the individual processes emphasized by traditional research in social psychology.

The three meanings of the term ‘social’ selected by Lukes suggested our initial attempts at ‘socializing’ attribution theory.