Most theories of attributions are multidimensional, suggesting that specific causal factors can be classified along such dimensions as internal-external, stable-unstable, or controllable-uncontrollable. To examine the dimensions underlying causal attributions in an educational setting, 345 students who had just received a grade on a major course…

An interview investigation was undertaken in which a group of nurses and a group of technicians reasoned about evidence for the existence of a causal relation in a medical and in a technical case. A statement about the existence of the relation was presented and the subjects were then asked as to what evidence there might and should be behind such…

Attributions affect coping with victimization. Battered women who blame their husbands' moods are less likely to leave than are women who blame their husbands' permanent characteristics for the violence. Abused women often have repeated contacts with crisis intervention workers and the attitudes of those workers may affect the attributions made by…

Early research demonstrating an association between success and the male stereotype and between failure and the female stereotype, and the Bayesian analysis of attribution theory provided the bases for predictions about the effects of gender and performance outcomes on probability estimates of future success. The relation between gender…

Parents of chronically ill children are faced with the difficult task of being vigilant and yet not overprotective of their children. The literature suggests that parents hold a positive bias toward their ill children. Attribution theory gives a framework in which to study parents' ideas about their children's behavior. A study was conducted to…

Research has associated high levels of private self-consciousness (PSC) with accurate self-knowledge and with behavior consistent with one's attitudes. A study by Buss and Scheier reported that privately self-conscious persons are more susceptible to attribution bias, the self-focus of such persons leading them to attribute their positive and…

Previous research has suggested the existence of a primacy effect in the attribution of ability. To test if the primacy effect occurs in situations where specific cues about the person and nature of the test materials are lacking or greatly reduced, college students corrected a multiple-choice test in which a phantom stimulus person correctly…

The purposes of this study were twofold: (1) to investigate the effect of movement for several inanimate objects on children's judgments of "aliveness;" and (2) to examine the nature of explanations given by three age groups of children in support of their judgments as to whether animate and inanimate objects were "alive" or…

The effect of an attribution retraining program intended to teach 35 learning disabled (LD) junior high school students to attribute achievement outcomes to the internal factor of effort was examined in the study. The research was concerned with LD adolescents' perceptions of personal (internal) and environmental (external) causality as…

There is evidence that anticipating continued performance at a task can enhance one's need for control, and will thereby influence the kinds of attributions that are made for one's performance. Causal attributions for performance in an introductory psychology course were examined with respect to students' estimates of the likelihood of their…

Recent studies indicate that investigators are now focusing on the cognitive determinants of the attribution process; however, few researchers are looking specifically at the attribution process over time. The impact of attitudinal and behavioral information on impression formation was studied to determine how impressions change over time. The…

This study explores the attribution patterns of undergraduate students for females and males who performed parenting tasks traditionally defined as feminine. A total of 136 men and 136 women were randomly assigned to one of eight conditions and were presented with stories of parent-child interactions which varied in terms of the success or failure…

Experimental research on social perceptions of rape victims has been conducted within the framework of two different models. The first, a naive observer model, is oriented toward how the average person perceives a rape victim and how her character and aspects of her behavior affect these perceptions. The second, a jury process model, is directed…

A teacher's ability and skill in estimating student states of mind provides essential information for deciding what and how to teach. (JD)