Results indicated that: (1) high information was ranked most important for drawing a stimulus inference; (2) low distinctiveness information was most important for drawing a person inference; and (3) low consistency information was most important for drawing a circumstance inference. (Author)

A theory of the lay epistemic process is outlined. An integrative framework is provided that allows consideration of diverse attributional models in common theoretical terms and derivation of the necessary applicability conditions of different such models. (Author/RL)

Observers tend to attribute causality for an actor's behavior to dispositional characteristics of the actor rather than to external factors. Determined whether dynamic qualities of the actor can account for observers' attentional and attributional behavior. Revealed that greater causality was attributed to the dynamic actor. (Author)

To determine whether heart rate increase can be attributed to increased sucking amplitude for sweeter fluids, sucking and heart rate of 20 full-term infants were studied. (MP)

Two studies conducted with children in kindergarten and grades 1-3 tested the hypothesis that the attribution of manipulative intentions to the donor underlies the tendency to discount intrinsic interest in the presence of rewards. The children made attributions for the behavior of story characters who had been offered a reward for task…

Examined whether aggressive boys, relative to nonaggressive boys, demonstrate hostile biases or general deficits in social perception. Found that aggressive boys demonstrated hostile biases, but not general deficits, in intention-cue detection relative to average-status boys. Aggressive groups proposed aggressive responses much more frequently…

Two experiments examined 6- to 11-year-olds' cognition about self- presentational behavior. Findings indicated that youngest children had difficulty in identifying self-presentational motives by story characters. Even with children who had mental-state reasoning skills required for understanding others' beliefs about the self, there remained…

The effects of two levels of task attribution and three levels of outcome attribution as responses to failure were examined. In the study, 181 male Navy recruit subjects were asked to predict the responses of a Navy recruit who received an unsatisfactory training report. (TJH)

Pairs of subjects engaged in brief conversations, then made trait ratings of causal attributions about their own or other person's behavior. Although observers made more extreme trait ratings than did actors, observers also made stronger external causal attributions than did actors. Concluded that actor-observer differences in descriptions of…

The study utilized written descriptions of sexual activity between an adult and a child to examine the impact of victim sex, perpetrator sex, respondent sex, and victim response (i.e., encouraging, passive, resisting) on the attribution of responsibility to the child and the adult perpetrator. Undergraduates (N=360) rated the vignettes. (Author/DB)

Two experiments investigated the role of continuity cues in infants' perception of launching events as causal. Results indicated that younger subjects' perceptions of the particular object may influence perception of causality and that infants' use of cues to causality changes with age. (WP)

Eighty kindergartners predicted and explained protagonists' emotional responses to hypothetical events. Children predicted anger most often when they believed protagonists could change undesirable situations and reinstate their goals and when they focused on persons or conditions that caused undesirable situations. Children predicted sadness most…

In a survey of 237 older adults, 63% of men and 57% of women felt their careers had been influenced by serendipitous events. Their descriptions were sorted into 11 categories of critical incidents; the most frequently cited were professional/personal connections, unexpected advancement, right place/right time, and marriage/family. (SK)

This study investigated the intergroup perceptions of 2 social groups. English adolescents aged 14-15 years were asked to make causal attributions for various positive and negative behaviors performed by members of an in-group and an out-group. In the first condition (n = 45), participants rated members of their own peer group and members of a…

A normative framework for modeling causal and counterfactual reasoning has been proposed by Spirtes, Glymour, and Scheines (1993; cf. Pearl, 2000). The framework takes as fundamental that reasoning from observation and intervention differ. Intervention includes actual manipulation as well as counterfactual manipulation of a model via thought. To…