situational attribution

n. When attempting to explain a person's behavior (what is referred to in psychology as making an attribution for the person's behavior), a situational attribution is made when it is assumed that the person has behaved in such a way because of something very specific to the situation the person was in (rather than influenced by some part of his or her personality or other internal factors). Situational attributions are a special case of external attributions, and the two concepts are often confused. An external attribution refers to anything outside the person that is thought to influence the person's behavior. For example, if a student gets a bad grade on an exam, a person might make an external attribution like the following: “The student did poorly on the exam because life is not fair” or “It was just bad luck.” These external attributions are due to something completely outside any person's control. A situational attribution is a specific case of an external attribution in that the cause of the behavior is outside the person's control. However, rather than explaining behavior as generally unfair or unlucky, situational attributions single out an element in the specific situation that caused the behavior. In the circumstances in the example, a person might make the following situational attribution: “The student did so poorly on the test because the teacher does not like him and graded him unfairly.” In this instance the attribution is considered situational because it is due to something specific to that situation (the teacher's evaluating the student unfairly) rather than some general enduring quality about the world (which would be an external attribution).  – VKP, LAB