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.
As per Weiner, if person A gives greater weightage to internal factors, then which one of the following will hold true for A ?
Answer & explanation
Correct answer: option 2
The correct answer is Option (2) → A’s intelligence
An internal cause is something within the person; an external cause is something outside the person, in the situation. In Weiner’s classification ability is internal and stable, effort or hard work is internal and unstable, fate is external and stable, and task characteristics are external and unstable.
Option (1) The task characteristic — Incorrect. The task lies outside the person; task characteristics are an external (and unstable) factor, so they are what a person stresses when giving weight to external causes.
Option (2) A’s intelligence — Correct. Intelligence is A’s own ability, a cause that lies within A. A person who gives greater weightage to internal factors explains what happens to her or him by such qualities of her or his own.
Option (3) A’s luck — Incorrect. Although the luck is ‘A’s’, it is not under A’s control; bad luck is an external factor that people blame for failure, like the difficulty of the task.
Option (4) Pleasant weather conditions — Incorrect. The weather is part of the situation around the person, an external cause.
Note: Weiner’s classification of causes into internal and external factors 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 … When we assign a cause to a person’s behaviour, we can broadly classify the cause as being internal — something within the person, or external — something outside the person.…”
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