Attributions for health-related behaviours

Attribution theory has been applied to the study of health and health-related behaviour. Herzlich (1973) interviewed 80 people about the general causes of health and illness and found that health is regarded as internal to the individual and illness is seen as something that comes into the body from the external world.
More specifically, attributions about [...]



 The development of attribution theory

The origins of attribution theory can be found in the work of Heider (1944, 1958), who argued that individuals are motivated to see their social world as predictable and controllable – that is, a need to understand causality. Kelley (1967, 1971) developed these original ideas and proposed a clearly defined attribution theory suggesting that attributions [...]