A total of 141 children, aged 6 to 10 years, were read eight illustrated attribution problems involving play and non-play behaviors and were asked to infer information concerning the story character's intrinsic or extrinsic motivation for the behaviors. Children were grouped into three age levels (mean ages 5.9, 8.8 and 10.3 years) for analysis of…

The examination of credibility effects in predicting achievement, an important step in the study of source credibility effects on attributions, substantiates Birnbaum's findings that variation in the credibility of information can be represented by changes in the weight of the information. Undergraduate subjects (N=65) predicted the performance of…

This paper is an application of attribution theory to the processing of juvenile delinquents in an attempt to understand the differential treatment of female and male offenders within the juvenile justice system. The paper explores the attributions of juvenile delinquency both by male and female minors, by male and female parents, and by male and…

To examine the effects of goal-setting on supervisors' evaluations of workers' performance, and on the causes attributed to that performance, 80 subjects were shown a simulated interaction between a worker and supervisor in one of three goal-setting conditions: self-set, participative, or assigned. The worker either succeeded or failed to meet the…

According to an attribution analysis, changing one's opinion toward the position advocated in a persuasive message is an outcome of one's inferences concerning why the communicator has taken the position. A study was undertaken to clarify the cognitive steps by which recipients went from information about communicator characteristics or…

This study investigated the nature of affective reactions of college students in a real-life testing situation, and the relationship of these affects to causal attributions and perceptions of success or failure. Ninety students responded to questions concerning their emotions after receiving results of an examination and indicated the contribution…

The purpose of the study was to experimentally determine if the attribution of positive or negative social values is associated with particular colors. The subjects were 76 four-and five-year old females drawn from six privately owned kindergartens and nurseries. The children were randomly assigned to one of two groups. In the control group, color…

The physical and interpersonal contexts within which rapes occur were investigated. The physical context, defined in terms of observers' perceptions of the likelihood of rapes occurring in a particular setting, produce variations in the degree of responsibility assigned to the victim. Women raped in high probability of rape settings were held as…

This study related subjects' perceptions of their causality for task participation to their causal attributions of task outcomes, their task attitudes, and their task motivation. Subjects received success or failure feedback on a creativity task after experimental manipulations had influenced their perception of their causality for task…

Subjects in five stress groups were threatened with electric shock while subjects in a sixth group were not. In one of the stress groups subjects were encouraged to misattribute (i.e., project) their feelings from the threat of shock to the experimenter instead of to the shock, while subjects in the remaining stress groups were not encouraged to…

Attribution theory focuses on the differences in perceptions that people have of the causes of behaviors and events. In this study attribution theory was used to determine the effect of role in a counseling interview on ratings of causal attributions for counselor and client behaviors. Counselor trainees (n=42) were randomly assigned to the roles…

The purpose of this paper is to present a social psychological explanation of the self-confrontation process. A model of self-confrontation based on attribution theory is introduced. The use of video tape playback as a tool for self-confrontation is discussed, and implications for research are outlined. (MPJ)

Two five-week test-retest reliability studies of a measure of the unit of perception of ongoing behavior were conducted. In the first, 25 females and 23 males segmented a 7-minute action sequence under fine-unit or gross-unit instructional sets. Number of units marked at first viewing correlated .87 with number of units at retest. Correlations…

The question of whether readers subjectively perceive the meaning of written materials is a specific form of the more general issue of whether human beings make or find knowledge. The subjectivist paradigm asserts that the first priority in the search for knowledge is the individual's awareness of personal motives for obtaining that knowledge. The…

After presenting the attributional model, this paper reviews research on individual differences in beliefs about causes of success and failure. Studies illustrating differential performance on achievement-related tasks by individuals who differ in their attributions are reviewed. Causal perceptions of success and failure should be considered, in…