The Use of Attribution Theory in Crisis Research

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2023 session is Yingru Ji, whose focus is on attribution theory in crisis events. Crises are negative events that occur to individuals, organisations, or larger communities; attribution theory considers how (I think) these crises are attributed to certain causes. The present paper examined how this theory has been operationalised in published research.

Results are that there has been a considerable growth in relevant articles over the past 20-odd years; there has been a strong focus on organisational and individual crises, and an extreme overrepresentation of the United States in the research. Media settings were considered only in about half of all articles. Most studies used quantitative measures for single-case studies. The study also produced a co-citation and co-keyword analysis, and most studies took single- and dual-agent approaches to attributing crisis responsibilities; few considered the role of social networks.

Future research with a focus on non-WEIRD countries and cross-cultural findings is therefore urgently required, as are studies considering the digital and intelligent media environment; there should also be greater methodological variety, advancing beyond quantitative methods by using computational and mixed methods; a relational, social network perspective is also required. There is also a need for more focus on emotions and bias in the process of attribution, e.g. by exploring bandwagon effects and media environment-induced attributional errors and bias.