Attribution in Relationships

Later work has extended attributional perspectives to a variety of relationship phenomena, including: (1) linking attributions, communications, and affect in ongoing relationships (Vangelisti 1992); (2) the types of attributions made by violent men regarding their marriages (Holtzworth-Munroe 1988); and (3) attributions made by women who are victims of marital violence (Andrews 1992). A primary conclusion of these extrapolations is that attributions play a key role in relationship events, often being implicated in causal sequence.

A further new direction that shows promise views attribution as part of people's natural stories, narratives, or accounts relating to their relationships. According to this approach, in their daily lives, people often form understandings and make attributions about their relationships in the form of storylike constructions that usually are privately developed initially and then are communicated to other people. Such diverse writings as those of Robert Weiss (1975) and John Harvey, Ann Weber, and Terri Orbuch (1990) may be interpreted as embracing this approach. Illustrative research stresses the collection of people's naturalistic attributional accounts and the linking of those accounts to relationship behavior.

In the early twenty-first century, a blossoming area of work concerned the interface of close relationships, attribution, and communication behavior. A recent edited book by Valerie Manusov and John Harvey (2001) documents work at this interface. An interesting line of work that illustrates this area was carried out by Manusov and Koenig (2001). They have examined the attributions that couples provide for nonverbal interaction behaviors as the meanings that these couples have ascribed to the communication cues. These authors are operationalizing the attribution as the message. In a similar research program, Alan Sillars, Linda Roberts, Tim Dun, and Kenneth Leonard (2001) also focus on attributions as communication. In their extensive coding of real-time interactions, Sillars and colleagues accessed the attributions that people gave to what they or their partners were likely thinking at the time of the interaction. Individual members of couples stated what they thought that they and their partner were attempting to communicate or what was probably going on in their minds as they interacted. Thus, the attributions reflected the couples' assessments of the meanings for the communication behaviors in which they or their partner engaged.

As Manusov (2001) argues, attributions may be seen as a form of communication that involves explanations for behaviors or events. Attributions may be viewed as necessary for communication cues (i.e., causal or other explanations are given for why someone communicated what or how he or she did). Attributions may be seen as an important part of the communicated message itself, with causal explanations becoming the meaning ascribed to or communicated by behaviors.

A plethora of other strands of work are evolving with attribution as a central construct. As Catherine Surra and colleagues have shown, attributions and communications help establish relational identity (Surra and Hughes 1997). Individuals in close relationships have identities connected to those relationships that presumably are cultivated over time through interaction and attributions held in private and sometimes communicated to the partner. These identities are fashioned and refined in accounts people develop about relationships and their own personal relationships in particular. Accounts, or storylike constructions containing attributions, remain a viable way for studying attributions in relationships.

A new theory of how relationships are maintained and enhanced argues that people take care in making attributions about their partners, emphasizing positive attributions but moreover accurate attributions (Harvey and Omarzu 1999). This theory, called minding the close relationship, also embraces the idea that a mutual, never-ending knowing process, involving self-disclosure and soliciting self-disclosures from other, is critical to relationship enhancement. Minding is the act of using one's mind purposefully in thinking and acting relevant to one's close relationship. Attributions about one's partner and the events unfolding in the relationship are assumed to be pervasive in ongoing flow of close relationships. Since this theory pivots around the attribution concept, we will outline aspects of the theory below.

According to minding theory, attributional activity is a central way in which we develop a sense of meaning about our relationships. Attributional activity reflects our trust and belief in our partners. When we attribute our partners' negative behaviors, such as rudeness or insensitivity, to outside causes we are essentially telling ourselves that they are not really insensitive; it is the situation. We believe better of them. However, if we attribute our partners' positive, caring acts to outside events or to self-interest, we are convincing ourselves not to believe in their love, not to trust their sincerity.

Minding theory stresses relationship-enhancing attributions. Relationship-enhancing attributions tend to be those that attribute positive behaviors to dispositional causes: "He came home early to spend time with me." "She called me at work because she cares about me." Negative behaviors, in contrast, are attributed more often to external causes: "She yelled at me because she's stressed at work." "He is late for our date because his car broke down." Attribution theorists such as Heider recognized that people's attributions of causality and responsibility often are mixtures of internal and external attribution. For example, the husband in the foregoing example may emphasize his wife's stress at work, but also attribute part of her temper display to her susceptibility to such stresses. In well-minded relationships, these attributional activities will be carefully carried out, which includes working to develop fair mixtures of internal and external attributions.

In well-minded relationships, partners will recognize how easy it is to be mistaken about a partner's behavior, feelings, intentions, and motivations, and how important it is to feel firm about attributions regarding behavior of their partner in different situations. Flexibility and willingness to reexamine attributions about one's partner and the relationship characterize well-minded relationships. Partners also will understand the value of honest, carefully developed attributions about their partner and relationship events. Not all attributions about one's partner or the relationship can be positive. On occasion, negative attributions can be used in redressing relationship problems and negotiating stronger relationships.

Partners who are minding well can use the knowledge that they have gained about each other to help ensure that they do not blindly attribute all good, or all bad, to their partners. Parts of the minding process build on each other. The knowledge and attribution components work together to help couples build trust and positive beliefs that are based in real knowledge and that they can feel confident about relying on.

Another prominent program of work on maintenance of close relationships that emphasizes attributions is being implemented by Benjamin Karney and colleagues. Benjamin Karney, James McNulty, and Nancy Frye (2001) pinpoint a specific mechanism at work in the maintenance and enhancement of close relationships that involves the extent to which individuals hold positive beliefs about their partner. Karney and his colleagues make the intriguing suggestion that relationship satisfaction may not necessarily result from the content of cognitions, but it may be more related to the manner in which the valence of cognitions at various levels (e.g., global vs. specific) are integrated. Because couples are likely to experience some adversity in their relationship, it is posited that their relationship satisfaction can be maintained to the extent to which individuals can separate cognitions associated with specific events from global beliefs about their partner. Attributions, the most widely studied cognitive process in the literature about close relationships, are proposed to affect relationship satisfaction by influencing the extent to which perceptions of specific behaviors modify global beliefs about one's partner. In all, Karney and his colleagues constructed an impressive model of the interplay between cognitive content, process, and structure. They believe that it will be important to link such results with other important variables, such as personality and life stress, to formulate a comprehensive model to characterize satisfaction in close relationships over time.