Research has established a reliable relationship between self-awareness and causal attribution, i.e., heightened attention toward the self increases attributions of responsibility to the self. It was hypothesized that increased availability or accessibility of self-related cognition would increase causal attributions to the self, although this…

In its original formulation, dissonance reduction was postulated as a mode for resolving behavior-attitude discrepancies. One mode of resolution has been demonstrated in the forced compliance paradigm, whereby a subject rectifies a counterattitudinal behavior with an actual belief, resulting in moderating beliefs. A forced compliance situation was…

Research has shown that attributing failure to lack of ability leads to lower motivation than does attributing the failure to lack of effort. An attributional model of motivation and performance following failure was tested with college students (N=63), who were preselected on the basis of their attributional styles for interpersonal failures, as…

The role of attributions in achievement situations is examined, as well as whether attributions can be altered by the implementation of specified instructional conditions. One hundred eighty nine students from four campuses of a city consolidated community college system were divided into two groups and taught over an 18-week semester by: (1)…

Although research suggests that marital communication is causally related to marital satisfaction, the processes by which marital communication style affects marital relationships have not been identified. These communication styles (conventional, speculative, controlling, contactful) are based on the degrees of self-disclosure and openness to the…

Five subject groups (adults and 11-, 9-, 7-, and 5-year-olds) were given affective reactions by a teacher, such as anger and pity, and asked to infer the teacher's causal attributions regarding why a student failed, such as low ability of lack of effort. There were systematic linkages between the following affect-attribution pairings:…

This exploratory study investigated subjects' reactions to the suffering of another person, with subjects categorized on the basis of their own levels of previous physical punishment by their parents. Within the just world victim derogation paradigm, subjects observed a similar/dissimilar other receiving punishing shocks (as compared to a no-shock…

Alcoholism is becoming an increasingly significant problem for women. At one time, women rarely drank and the female alcoholic was an anomaly. Estimates of the total number of women alcoholics in the United States today are over 900,000. Women now constitute from 20 to 35% of all alcoholics in this country. This paper attempts to gain…

Educators are becoming increasingly concerned with social psychological variables affecting classroom behavior. This study attempts to determine if the achievement attribution model is supported in an actual classroom setting with college students actually taking an important exam. Participants were 35 volunteers from an introductory social…

A total of 141 children, aged 6 to 10 years, were read eight illustrated attribution problems involving play and non-play behaviors and were asked to infer information concerning the story character's intrinsic or extrinsic motivation for the behaviors. Children were grouped into three age levels (mean ages 5.9, 8.8 and 10.3 years) for analysis of…

The examination of credibility effects in predicting achievement, an important step in the study of source credibility effects on attributions, substantiates Birnbaum's findings that variation in the credibility of information can be represented by changes in the weight of the information. Undergraduate subjects (N=65) predicted the performance of…

This paper is an application of attribution theory to the processing of juvenile delinquents in an attempt to understand the differential treatment of female and male offenders within the juvenile justice system. The paper explores the attributions of juvenile delinquency both by male and female minors, by male and female parents, and by male and…

To examine the effects of goal-setting on supervisors' evaluations of workers' performance, and on the causes attributed to that performance, 80 subjects were shown a simulated interaction between a worker and supervisor in one of three goal-setting conditions: self-set, participative, or assigned. The worker either succeeded or failed to meet the…

According to an attribution analysis, changing one's opinion toward the position advocated in a persuasive message is an outcome of one's inferences concerning why the communicator has taken the position. A study was undertaken to clarify the cognitive steps by which recipients went from information about communicator characteristics or…

This study investigated the nature of affective reactions of college students in a real-life testing situation, and the relationship of these affects to causal attributions and perceptions of success or failure. Ninety students responded to questions concerning their emotions after receiving results of an examination and indicated the contribution…