Bernard Weiner

Attribution theory seeks to explain the causes of an event or behavior. A three stages process, they are observations, determination of behavior, and attributing to causes. There are two types of attributions, namely external and internal. External attribution relates causality to outside agents, whereas, internal attribution assigns the person himself for any behavior. In a 1996 interview, Weiner elaborated how attribution contributes to "high ability, high achievement, and giftedness", stating that "other-perception and self-perception form a unity, together, which influence task persistence and, therefore, actual ability."

Weiner has published 15 books and many articles on the psychology of motivation and emotion, and has been a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles since 1965.

Weiner received his undergraduate degree in Liberal Arts from the University of Chicago in 1955 and an MBA, majoring in Industrial Relations, from the same university in 1957. Following two years of service in the U.S. Army, Weiner enrolled in a PhD program in personality at the University of Michigan, where he was mentored by John Atkinson, one of the leading personality and motivational psychologists of that era. Weiner completed his PhD in 1963, and spent two years as an assistant professor at the University of Minnesota before joining the psychology faculty at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) in 1965, where he remained active into the early 2000s.

Bernard Weiner (born 1935) is an American social psychologist known for developing a form of attribution theory which seeks to explain the emotional and motivational entailments of academic success and failure. His contributions include linking attribution theory, the psychology of motivation, and emotion.