That anger engendered by means of insult or frustration is physiologically arousing has been demonstrated. This research was designed to investigate the availability of anger to misattribution, an attribution error, and, by this means, the effectiveness of misattribution in reducing aggressive behavior. (Author/RK)

Studied effects of verbal accounts offered by a threatener on targets' (N=82) subsequent attributions of the threatener's social motives. Results showed a cooperative account led to an inference of cooperative disposition, a transrelational equity account led to attribution of deceit, and an excuse of ignorance was linked with apathy. (WAS)

Two experiments attempted to directly assess the impact of self-other perspective on success and failure attributions for a variety of achievement-related situations. (Author/RK)

Two studies are reported which utilize a variety of achievement situations. It was hypothesized that subjects would spontaneously make attributions to ability, effort, luck and/or task difficulty in all these situations and that they would seek information of the types used in previous studies. (Author/RK)

This experiment attempted to support McMahan's (1973) attributional theory, which assumes that expectations reflect relatively fixed perceptions, and that people try to avoid making changes in these perceptions, and Frieze and Weiner's (1971) finding that success was attributed to internal factors more than was failure, while failure was more…

Compared smokers' (214) and nonsmokers' (220) explanations for cigarette smoking behavior to determine predictors of cigarette consumption. Results showed addiction and affective smoking were the most important motives predicting consumption. Presented at the meeting of the Southeastern Psychological Association, Washington, DC, 1980. (WAS)

Develops measures of individual differences in attribute centrality, investigates convergent validity, and explores differences in central and noncentral attribute functions within same person. University students in three countries completed questionnaires. Four relative centrality measures correlated with information required to make decisions…

Examined observer error in attitude attribution. Subjects appeared to have invested essays, written under assignment, with diagnostic value on the presumption of a correlation between the strength of the essay and the writer's attitude. Suggests that attribution error is based on the inclination to adopt a diagnostic judgmental set. (Author)

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)

Examines whether self-consciousness, a personality disposition, affects self-attributions and attempts to replicate the research findings of Duval and Wicklund (1973) that self-awareness affects self-attributions. (Author/RK)

Tests the possibility that observers who are attempting to empathize with an actor will make causal attributions about the actor's behavior which place relatively more emphasis on situational, environmental factors than do observers who are not induced to develop an empathic set. (Author/RK)

While theoretical analogs of misattribution therapy appeared promising, attempts with clinically relevant behaviors have not been successful. This study attempted to increase plausibility by manipulating familarity with the setting and psychological arousal in a clinically relevent situation. Authors conclude misattribution effect is not effective…

When a person acts bizarre, out of role, or in other extreme ways, the perceiver often attributes to that person an extreme disposition, and the attribution is made with confidence. Two experiments were conducted to investigate a modification of this analysis of attribution (Jones & Davis, 1965). (Author/RK)