Apologies are admissions of blameworthiness for an undesirable event and allow actors to try to obtain a pardon from the audience. In an investigation of the uses and forms of apologies, 120 subjects participated in a role-play study where they imagined themselves to be central characters who bumped into a "victim." Apologies were used in a…

Teenagers, classified according to Rotter's Locus of Control Scale, indicated whether or not and why they engaged in alcohol consumption or marijuana smoking. A higher proportion of externals drank but the groups did not generally differ in marijuana smoking behaviors. (Author/BEF)

Research has provided support for the existence of certain actor-observer and self-serving biases in individuals' retrospective analyses about the causes of behavior. A question that has been relatively unexplored deals with whether the findings on actor-observer differences and the self-serving pattern in attributions are generalizable to…