Dispositional attribution (or internal attribution) is a phrase in personality psychology that refers to the tendency to assign responsibility for others' behaviors due to their inherent characteristics, such as their motives, beliefs or personality, rather than the external (situational) influences, such as the individual's environment or culture.
When a person uses dispositional attributions,[1] they infer that another person is behaving in a certain way or that an event is occurring and try to explain that it is due to factors related to the person's character more than their situational context. Or rather, simplified, dispositional attribution is the act of placing blame on some type of factor or criteria that could be controlled by an individual for the cause of a certain event.[2]