We focus on three aspects of the articles of Reyna, of Perry, Stupnisky, Daniels and Haynes, and of Murdock, Beauchamp and Hinton. The first aspect is the logic of causal chain, a logic that we differentiate from a more deterministic approach. The second one is the mode of corrective action (attribution retraining) that is planned for students,…

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…

People tend to have both public and private selves, creating different images in their own minds, and in the minds of others. High self-monitoring individuals (SMIs), as identified through the Self Monitoring Scale, observe their public images and adapt them to produce desired effects. They tend to see themselves as pragmatic, flexible, and…

Recounts an experiment where two groups of college students composed questions for a simulated quiz show and then answered each other's questions. They then answered questions comparing their performance with other groups. Proposes a social norm rather than attribution error explanation for the fact that groups consistently will underestimate…