Who was the American psychologist who first proposed attribution theory?

The American psychologist Fritz Heider first proposed the attribution theory.

Attribution theory was first proposed by Hyde in 1958 in "Interpersonal Psychology". Therefore, Hyde is the founder of attribution theory. He pointed out that the causes of human behavior can be divided into internal causes and external causes.

Internal causes refer to factors that exist in the actor himself, such as needs, emotions, interests, attitudes, beliefs, efforts, etc.; external causes refer to factors in the actor’s surrounding environment, such as others. expectations, rewards, punishments, indicators, orders, the quality of the weather, the difficulty of the work, etc.

Hyde's "attribution theory" is a theory about the logical combination between a certain behavior of a person and its attributes such as motivation, purpose and value orientation. Hyde believes that when people make attributions, they usually use the principle of invariance, which is to look for an invariant connection between a specific result and a specific cause.

If a specific cause is always associated with a certain result under many conditions, if the specific cause does not exist, the corresponding result will not occur. This attributes a specific outcome to that specific cause. The method of thinking of the principle of invariance is scientific, and this method can be used to find the key reasons for a certain behavior or its results.