This study investigated how college students decide the amount of reward or punishment a problem solver deserves. Persons engaged in solitary tasks were evaluated differently than those in cooperative tasks. Inferences of causality influenced evaluations, whereas other factors did not. (Author/DB)

Explores some attributional determinants of third and fourth graders' self-punishment following transgression in a moral situation. Results were interpreted as supporting the hypothesis that children who are told by adults that they possess desirable moral characteristics experience particularly strong remorse when they fail to exercise…

Investigated the effects of the consensus and sentence structure of single sentence descriptions of different behaviors on causal attributions. High consensus produced less person attribution than did low consensus, and passive items produced more stimulus attribution than did active items. (Author)

Undergraduates analyzed a story in which an agent's intervention was followed by the target's compliance, noncompliance, or countercompliance to the request. Influence was attributed to the agent in conditions demonstrating change, regardless of direction of change. Influence decreased if the target delayed final compliance. (Author/CP)

Documents characteristics of emotions in relation to action and self-perception. Argues that taking affect into account yields a different interpretation of successful achievement-change programs. Also clarifies the differences between ability and effort as perceived causes of success and failure. (Author/GC)

The goodness-of-fit rule was used in the attribution of causality for acquaintances when the behavior could be made to fit with extant impressions. When the behavior was completely inconsistent with extant impressions, the most external attributions were made in the poor fit/high consensus condition. (Author)

Observed subjects evidenced less tendency to attribute their failure to low ability than did nonobserved subjects and greater willingness to attribute failure to lack of effort. For a task intended to be of minimal relevance to subjects' identities, nonobserved subjects attributed failure to task difficulty. (Author)

A study of the extent to which people are likely to attribute traits to other people rather more than to themselves produced support for the Jones and Nisbett hypothesis. The level of trait attribution in the present study was higher than that obtained in previous studies. (Author)

Develops a theory of strategic, political silence which directs public attribution of predictable meanings towards political leaders who unexpectedly refuse to speak in public. The meanings are mystery, uncertainty, passivity, and relinquishment. Illustrates the theory with a criticism of President Carter's silence in July 1979. (JMF)

Investigates the relationship between causal attributions and responses to social rejection across popularity levels, focusing on individual differences along each dimension. (Author/SS)

Examined how children come to understand that internally experienced affect need not be behaviorally expressed and that the emotion that is expressed is not necessarily what is being felt internally. Sixty elementary school students were interviewed about four interpersonal conflict situations presented in comic strip style but using photographs…

Two experiments were conducted to test the hypothesis that persons process a stimulus less extensively when they are part of a group that is responsible for the task than when they are individually responsible. Subjects were college students. (Author/MP)

Test results on the effects of achievement outcome on causal attributions were determined using a stabilometer performance as the criterion task. (JD)

Results showed that when information about a target individual was presented in two internally consistent blocks which were mutually contradictory, impressions produced by concrete operational adolescents contained a significantly greater proportion of evaluative statements in the same evaluative direction as the first block of information…

Causal attributions for a manipulated success-failure event were collected from college students on five different measuring instruments. Results indicated that the structured measures showed greater interest correlation validity than did the open-ended measure. (CM)