Personal Quality

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

The Principles established in Stephen R. Covey’s book are supposed to help a person achieve true interdependent "effectiveness". Covey argues this is achieved by aligning oneself to what he calls "true north"—principles of a character ethic that, unlike values, he believes to be universal and timeless. The book presents the principles in four sections.

Paradigms and Principles. Here, Covey introduces the basic foundation for the creation of the habits.

Private Victory. Here, Covey introduces the first three habits intended to take a person from dependence to independence, or one's ability to be self-reliant. You must be able to win your private victories before you can start on your public victories. If you start to win your public victories first, how can you feel good about yourself and still work on habits...

Public Victory. Here, Covey introduces habits four through six which are intended to lead to interdependence, the ability to align one's needs and desires with those of other people and create effective relationships.

Heider (1958) was the first to propose a psychological theory of attribution, but Weiner and colleagues (e.g., Jones et al, 1972; Weiner, 1974, 1986) developed a theoretical framework that has become a major research paradigm of social psychology. Heider discussed what he called “naïve” or “commonsense” psychology. In his view, people were like amateur scientists, trying to understand other people’s behavior by piecing together information until they arrived at a reasonable explanation or cause.

Attribution theory is concerned with how individuals interpret events and how this relates to their thinking and behavior. Attribution theory assumes that people try to determine why people do what they do. A person seeking to understand why another person did something may attribute one or more causes to that behavior. According to Heider a person can make two attributions