In our everyday life, we often need to anticipate the potential occurrence of events and their consequences. In this context, the way we represent contingencies can determine our ability to adapt to the environment. However, it is not clear how agents encode and organize available knowledge about the future to react to possible states of the…

Subjects (N=82) were given either veridical or false feedback concerning their level of intimacy one week after a short structured interaction with another. Results indicated that feedback had a greater effect on the reported degree of liking for the other and the disclosure level. (Author/RC)

Assessed effects of an individual's temporal pattern of success on attributions of responsibility for winning or losing simulated free throw contests. The player on a winning team who scored at the end was judged responsible for the outcome. (Author/BEF)

The relationship between perceived freedom and the attribution of attitudes was investigated. Observers were asked to infer an attitude from an actor's behavior when the actor's behavioral freedom was ambiguous. Attributions of attitude corresponded less to the behavior when it was unexpected and when the actor's potential lack of freedom was made…

College students (N=18) participating in personal growth groups completed questionnaires about consistency, consensus, and distinctivenesses of feedback received from the group. Findings argue that consensus is an important variable in determining whether feedback is accepted and in channeling attributions of reasons for why particular feedback is…

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)

Within the area of attribution theory, an overjustification effect is inferred if, following reward for an intrinsically interesting activity, individuals subsequently show less interest in that activity than comparable individuals who receive no reward. In an attempt to isolate the overjustification effect, 60 college students (30 male, 30…

Psychologists and laymen alike often use the terms "shame" and "guilt" interchangeably. Guilt is an affective state most often associated with a focus on some past behaviors which the subject finds inconsistent with a set of internalized standards which are often, but not necessarily moral in nature. Shame involves less of a…

Based on a modification of Berglas and Jones' (1978) design, conditions of contingent and noncontingent success and failure were manipulated to determine when and why individuals choose to adopt self-handicapping strategies. Male undergraduates (N=76) were informed that they were participating in a study investigating the effects of music on…

Two enduring questions in psychology concern the effects on behavior of traits and of attitudes. One method of altering the relative influence of traits or attitudes is by manipulating the activity of those areas of the brain which attend more to the self or to the external environment. Two experiments were conducted to test whether manipulation…

Previous research provides support for two distinct models of expectation behavior in experimental games. The similarity pattern describes expectations that are similar to the actor's behavior regardless of whether the actor is cooperative or competitive. The triangularity pattern describes expectations that are both similar and dissimilar to…

Kruglanski's endogenous-exogenous partition, when applied to reasons given by smokers for smoking cigarettes, distinguishes two types of actions: (1) endogenous reasons implying that the behavior of consuming the cigarette is the goal of the action and the actor is positive toward the behavior, and (2) exogenous reasons implying that the behavior…

Self-serving biases in attribution have been widely explored; however, the effects of motivational factors on observers' causal attributions have been neglected in attribution research. To investigate these effects, observers' liking and perceived similarity toward a target person were manipulated. Subjects were 80 college students. The observer…

Performance expectancy and satisfaction were investigated in terms of the rate of change in performance outcomes. In a two-by-two factorial design, the direction (improving or deteriorating) and rate (accelerating or decelerating) of change in performance were manipulated using false feedback in a computerized math game. In accord with performance…

Past research has shown significant treatment versus control differences using paradox, although the literature often does not detail how the paradoxical directive is given to the client. College students (N=105) were tested with the Procrastination Log and the 40 with the highest scores were selected in order to study the effectiveness of paradox…