Briana Anderson - Cornell University

Explaining the Attractiveness-Credibility Link: Attribution Theory – Social
Psychology
9
The majority of advertising studies related to the role of attractiveness in
source credibility judgments offers evidence that people often make more positive
judgments regarding a communicator’s credibility based primarily on a physical
attractiveness cue. Many of these studies are rooted in the substantive domain
(Brinberg & McGrath, 1982), meaning that they begin with a practical problem, i.e.
how to gain credibility for a certain product in a certain context, and develop a
methodology to test that particular study. These studies often draw from differing
theories to explain why this phenomenon occurs. Attribution theory offers a
theoretical framework through which these studies can be interpreted.
Attribution theory has its origins in Fritz Heider’s (1958) The Psychology of
Interpersonal Relations, which offers a theoretical base for how individuals make
causal inferences about everyday occurrences, that is, at a fundamental level people
try to make sense of every phenomenon they encounter. An important concept in
attribution theory is that of inferential processes – people arrive at judgments of causes
based on an analytical process. Basically, people tend to overestimate the impact of
features that are salient in the perceiver’s environment. The first step in forming an
impression of a person is to observe their behavior. Those elements that are most
salient, i.e. most prominent from the perspective of the perceiver will be the most
important when a person makes a judgment.
From this theoretical base, research has shown that on contact with the
appearance or behavior of another, a person will make inferences about the person or
organization that correspond with the observation. This is known as the ‘fundamental
attribution error’ (Ross, 1977; Jones & Nisbett, 1972) because people attribute
qualities to people based on this initial impression that actually may be caused by