The Basic Idea
Rather than accepting certain behaviors or events, we like to make explanations for them. If you receive an A+ on an assessment, are you more likely to say it was due to your inherent talent or your hard work? Could it be a mix of both?
When faced with more than one possible explanation for an event or behavior, humans discount, or minimize, the importance of each reason.1 If one explanation seems plausible, we will disregard the other potential factors as irrelevant. The discounting principle is part of Kelley’s Covariation Model of attribution theory, a model for explaining how humans determine the causes of certain events or behaviors.
It is natural to ask (a) whether there are other ways to take plausible causes into account and (b) what might be all the possible forms of such ‘taking into account.
– Harold Kelley on applying the discounting principle in his 1972 article, “Causal Schemata and the Attribution Process”
