Examined whether aggressive boys, relative to nonaggressive boys, demonstrate hostile biases or general deficits in social perception. Found that aggressive boys demonstrated hostile biases, but not general deficits, in intention-cue detection relative to average-status boys. Aggressive groups proposed aggressive responses much more frequently…

Two experiments examined 6- to 11-year-olds' cognition about self- presentational behavior. Findings indicated that youngest children had difficulty in identifying self-presentational motives by story characters. Even with children who had mental-state reasoning skills required for understanding others' beliefs about the self, there remained…

The effects of two levels of task attribution and three levels of outcome attribution as responses to failure were examined. In the study, 181 male Navy recruit subjects were asked to predict the responses of a Navy recruit who received an unsatisfactory training report. (TJH)

Pairs of subjects engaged in brief conversations, then made trait ratings of causal attributions about their own or other person's behavior. Although observers made more extreme trait ratings than did actors, observers also made stronger external causal attributions than did actors. Concluded that actor-observer differences in descriptions of…

The study utilized written descriptions of sexual activity between an adult and a child to examine the impact of victim sex, perpetrator sex, respondent sex, and victim response (i.e., encouraging, passive, resisting) on the attribution of responsibility to the child and the adult perpetrator. Undergraduates (N=360) rated the vignettes. (Author/DB)

Two experiments investigated the role of continuity cues in infants' perception of launching events as causal. Results indicated that younger subjects' perceptions of the particular object may influence perception of causality and that infants' use of cues to causality changes with age. (WP)

Eighty kindergartners predicted and explained protagonists' emotional responses to hypothetical events. Children predicted anger most often when they believed protagonists could change undesirable situations and reinstate their goals and when they focused on persons or conditions that caused undesirable situations. Children predicted sadness most…

In a survey of 237 older adults, 63% of men and 57% of women felt their careers had been influenced by serendipitous events. Their descriptions were sorted into 11 categories of critical incidents; the most frequently cited were professional/personal connections, unexpected advancement, right place/right time, and marriage/family. (SK)

This study investigated the intergroup perceptions of 2 social groups. English adolescents aged 14-15 years were asked to make causal attributions for various positive and negative behaviors performed by members of an in-group and an out-group. In the first condition (n = 45), participants rated members of their own peer group and members of a…

A normative framework for modeling causal and counterfactual reasoning has been proposed by Spirtes, Glymour, and Scheines (1993; cf. Pearl, 2000). The framework takes as fundamental that reasoning from observation and intervention differ. Intervention includes actual manipulation as well as counterfactual manipulation of a model via thought. To…

Two factors potentially affect observers' attributions of responsibility to a rape survivor: how closely they identify with the survivor and how much they adhere to rape myths. To assess the impact of these factors, 157 female college students categorized by their sexual assault history and by their acceptance of rape myths, evaluated a sexual…

This article explores how an attribution model will illustrate uniqueness-seeking behavior in dressing in the Taiwanese adolescent subculture. The study employed 443 senior high school students. Results show that the tendency of uniqueness-seeking behavior in dressing is moderate. However, using cluster analysis to segment the counterconformity…

Although human resource development practitioners and researchers emphasize organizational culture as a major contributor to employee learning and development, results from this study suggest organizational subculture has greater influence on employee-related learning motivation. The relationships among organizational culture, organizational…

This study explores cultural differences between European American (n = 26) and Asian American (n = 17) parents' attributional ratings of children with Down syndrome. Links were examined among parents' attributions, reactions, and behaviors regarding their child's jigsaw-puzzle performance. Although the children's puzzle abilities did not differ,…

The aim of this study was to explore the developmental links between conversational perspective-taking and false belief attribution. To examine this, 81 children aged between 3 and 4 years participated in a longitudinal study over a period of 1 year, with three measurement sessions being performed at 6-month intervals. The children were assessed…