Attitudes and attributions

Chris McVittie

Andy McKinlay

pp. 269-289

in: Brendan Gough (ed), The Palgrave handbook of critical social psychology, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017

Abstract

Much social psychological study of attitudes and attributions has treated these as properties that are intrinsic to the individual, indicating how the individual evaluates or explains phenomena in the external social world. Critical approaches, by contrast, argue that in expressing evaluations or explanations, individuals are constructing versions of the phenomena that they are describing. From this perspective, evaluative or explanatory talk is oriented towards achieving local outcomes, such as accounting for individuals' choices, avoiding blame or similar. Attitudes and attributions can thus be seen as produced in discourse and oriented to social actions rather than being (mere) outcomes of individual information processing.