Bernard Weiner

Who is Bernard Weiner?

Bernard Weiner is a social psychologist who is known for developing a form of attribution theory which explains the emotional and motivational entailments of academic success and failure. Bernard Weiner got interested in the field of attribution after first studying achievement motivation. He used TAT to identify differences in people’s achievement needs and then turned to the study of individual issues people face when they think of their own successes and failures. One of his students, Linda Beckman, came up with this topic, and from then on, Bernard Weiner carried on further investigation which led him to a road of the cognitive processes that have motivational influence. Being a three stage process, attribution theory explains the causes of an event or behavior. The three stages include observations and determination of behavior, and attributing to causes. There are two types of attributions; external and internal. External attribution relates causality to outside agents, whereas, internal attribution assigns the person himself for any behavior. In one of his interviews in 1996, Bernard Weiner was asked the following: "How does attribution contribute to high ability, high achievement, and giftedness?" His answer is the proceeding paragraph.