Read the passage given below to answer.
In our day-to day life, we assign certain causes or reasons to a person's behaviour. This process is called attribution. Broadly, causes of a person are attributed to internal and external factors. External factors are related to situation. With reference to success and failure, Weiner has classified causes into internal/external and stable/unstable factors. In general, people attribute success to internal factors such as their ability and hard work. However, failure is attributed to external factors such as task difficulty and bad luck. Ability/fate and hard-work/task-difficulty are considered as stable and unstable factors respectively. Stable factors refer to those causes that do not change with time. It has been observed that people have a tendency to give greater weightage to internal factors than external one. This phenomenon is called the fundamental attribution error. This tendency is stronger in some cultures than in others. Research suggests that Indians tend to make more external attributions than Americans do.
Weiner is famous for his work on :
Answer & explanation
Correct answer: option 3
The correct answer is Option (3) → Attribution
Option (1) Attraction — Incorrect. Attraction is about liking other people and wanting to be close to them. Weiner’s work in the passage is about the causes people give for success and failure, not about liking.
Option (2) Aptitude — Incorrect. Aptitude is a person’s potential for acquiring some specific skills with training, measured by aptitude tests. It has nothing to do with explaining why a person succeeded or failed.
Option (3) Attribution — Correct. Attribution is the process of assigning causes to a person’s behaviour. When people make attributions for success and failure, the causes can be classified into internal or external factors, and also into stable or unstable factors; Weiner suggested this classification of causal factors.
Option (4) Affection — Incorrect. Affection is a warm feeling of fondness for someone. Like attraction, it is a feeling towards a person, not a cause assigned to behaviour.
Note: Weiner’s work on the attribution of causality was explained in the chapter ‘Attitude and Social Cognition’ of the pre-rationalised NCERT, which NTA followed in 2022, and is not there in the NCERT book (2025-26) or in the 2023-24 NCERT.
NCERT (Pre-rationalised): “Attribution of Causality … After forming an impression, we often go through the process of assigning causes to a person’s behaviour.…” “…When people make attributions for success and failure, the causes they give can be classified into internal or external factors, and also into stable or unstable factors. Bernard Wiener suggested a classification which is shown in Figure 6.4.…”
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