Causal Attribution Quotes

I am not to blame for putting forward, in the course of my work on science, any general rule derived from a previous conclusion.

I don't believe in blaming inanimate objects for anything.

There’s a belief that something’s wrong if you don’t have what other people have—that it’s because you’re ‘disadvantaged.’ A teenage dropout mother is told she has a disadvantage. But if you’re going to call the negative consequences of chosen behavior ‘disadvantage,’ the word is corrupt beyond repair and useful only for propaganda purposes.

I think rap music is brought up, gangster rap in particular, as well as video games, every other thing they try to hang the ills of society on as a scapegoat.

The weatherman is not only blamed for his failure to foretell, he is blamed for the weather itself.

It is tempting at one level to believe that bad things happen to people (especially other people) because God is a righteous judge who gives them exactly what they deserve. By believing that we keep the world orderly and understandable.... But [this belief] has a number of serious limitations.... It teaches people to blame themselves. It creates guilt when there is no basis for guilt. And most disturbing of all, it does not even fit the facts.

When good befalls a man he calls it Providence, when evil fate.

Pessimists see problems as stemming from stable and universal causes, thus making them less susceptible to corrective action. Optimists, in contrast, view problems as temporary and resulting from specific factors that will either change or be changed.

I sincerely think that firing Roger Lemerre was the easiest solution. There had to be a guilty party, and it was him. He was the ideal prey. He had his share of responsibility like everybody else, like the French FA who organised friendly matches at the other end of the world, but the actors - the players - have the greatest share of it.

[People] don't judge you on what would have happened in the absence of a decision.

If a person is A) poorly, B) receives treatment intended to make him better, and C) gets better, then no power of reasoning known to medical science can convince him that it may not have been the treatment that restored his health.

The voting public is not very good at attributing credit and blame to presidents. They get too much credit when things go well and too much blame when things go badly. The same applies to coaches, C.E.O.'s, parents, and anyone else in charge.

Therefore to the same natural effects we must, as far as possible, assign the same causes.

This is how Americans think. You believe that if something terrible happens to someone, they must have deserved it.

To say that a man is sinful because he sins is to give an operational definition of sin. To say that he sins because he is sinful is to trace his behavior to a supposed inner trait. But whether or not a person engages in the kind of behavior called sinful depends upon circumstances which are not mentioned in either question. The sin assigned as an inner possession (the sin a person "knows") is to be found in a history of reinforcement.