Attribution in Relationships

Increasingly, attribution is being applied in understanding close relationships by scholars who represent diverse countries and cultures. A small sampling of representative work will be reviewed here.

In one study, seventy-four French-Canadian couples reported on attributions for global marital conflict and marital adjustment (Sabourin, Lussier, and Wright 1991). It was found that the more likely individuals were to attribute their marital conflicts to global or stable causes and to assign blame to their partners, the more likely they were to report marital dissatisfaction. Global attributions for marital conflicts were the most consistent predictors of marital satisfaction scores.

A study of attribution and marital distress in China and the United States was carried out by Daniel Stander, Donald Hsiung, and Donald Mac-Dermid (2001). In this work, thirty-six couples from China and thirty-two couples from the United States reported attributions associated with various types of conflict they had indicated to be occurring in their relationships. It was found that marital attributions were correlated with marital distress for both groups. However, the Chinese spouses tended to report more relationship-enhancing causal attributions than did spouses in the United States. There also were some differences in attributions of responsibility and blame across cultures.

Garth Fletcher (1993) has carried out a substantial program of work in New Zealand concerned with attribution and close relationships. He argues that the standard close relationship attribution model, which is concerned with connections between relationship satisfaction and causal attributions, is silent about the information processing involved in the links between dispositional structures, such as relationship satisfaction, and cognition, affect, and behavior. His model encompasses the outcomes when eliciting events during an interaction between partners are subjected to automatic/controlled processing. He studies close relationships beliefs, specific relationship knowledge structures, affect, and behavioral interactions in his program. Fletcher's work has not suggested major differences in information-processing tendencies for attributions in relationships across comparisons of couples in New Zealand, the United States, and Europe.

Other representative work has focused on attributions and self-serving biases in attributions among persons in relationships in India (Higgins and Bhatt 2001) and attributional style and self-concept among people in relationships in Hong Kong (Poon and Lau 1999). These studies showed that people in India and Hong Kong used attributions in ways found in previous studies in the United States (e.g., higher self-esteem for respondents shown for the Hong Kong study if the respondents attributed relationship problems to outside forces affecting their relationships).

More work is necessary to investigate attribution-relationship linkages in cultures not influenced by Western mores. A major difficulty facing this type of cross-cultural work is to be able to translate standardized instruments into different languages in a way that is both meaningful to the respondents and, at the same time, consistent with the intent of the questions and measures used.