Causal attribution and self-justification as explanations for the consensus expectation of one's social value orientation

This study focuses on explanations for the perceived consensus of one's own social value orientation. The prediction of the triangle hypothesis that the consensus expectation of individualistic and competitive people is higher than that of cooperative people was partially supported. Only individualists expected their own orientation more frequently of other people. According to a causal attribution explanation, it was expected that subjects' causal attributions for their own orientation to internal and external causes influenced their consensus expectations. Only attributions to internal causes differed significantly between subjects with different orientations and corresponded with their consensus estimates. Individualism was attributed least internally, cooperation most internally, and competition in between. Additionally, direct support for the effect of internal attributions on consensus expectations was found. Compared with subjects who attributed their own orientation more internally, subjects who attributed it less internally were more likely to expect their own orientation among other people. According to a self-justification explanation, it was hypothesized that the consensus expectations of individualists and competitors would be higher when first their own social orientation was assessed and then the orientation they expected to predominate among others than in the reversed order. This hypothesis was not supported.     

The stigma of having a parent with mental illness: Genetic attributions and associative stigma

Children often report associative stigma because they are ‘contaminated’ by association with a parent who has a mental illness. An exploratory study was conducted to investigate the role of genetic attributions in the aetiology of associative stigma. The first hypothesis was that genetic attributions would predict associative stigma over and above the contribution of biochemical and stressful‐event attributions, while the second hypothesis was that the relationship between genetic attributions and associative stigma would be mediated by the perceived likelihood that children would develop the same disorder as their parents. Two‐hundred‐and‐two individuals were asked to read a hypothetical scenario describing a teenage girl whose mother had been diagnosed with either schizophrenia or depression. Both hypotheses were supported. The findings of the study have implications for a number of professions working in the community such as teachers and psychologists. Additional avenues for future research are also explored.     

Distinguishing genuine from spurious causes: a coherence hypothesis

Two opposing views have been proposed to explain how people distinguish genuine causes from spurious ones: the power view and the covariational view. This paper notes two phenomena that challenge both views. First, even when 1) there is no innate specific causal knowledge about a regularity (so that the power view does not apply) and 2) covariation cannot be computed while controlling for alternative causes (so that the covariation view should not apply), people are still able to systematically judge whether a regularity is causal. Second, when an alternative cause explains the effect, a spurious cause is judged to be spurious with greater confidence than otherwise (in both cases, no causal mechanism underlies the spurious cause). To fill the gap left by the traditional views, this paper proposes a new integration of these views. According to the coherence hypothesis, although a genuine cause and a spurious one may both covary with an effect in a way that does not imply causality at some level of abstraction, the categories to which these candidate causes belong covary with the effect differently at a more abstract level: one covariation implies causality; the other does not. Given this superordinate knowledge, the causal judgments of a reasoner who seeks to explain as much as possible with as few causal rules as possible will exhibit the properties that challenge the traditional views. Two experiments tested and supported the coherence hypothesis. Both experiments involved candidate causes that covary with an effect without implying causality at some level, manipulating whether covariation that implies causality has been acquired at a more abstract level. The experiments differed on whether an alternative cause explains the effect.     

Causal attributions, sanctions, and normal mood variations

The causal-locus hypothesis (CLH) asserts that persons making internal attributions for failure and external attributions for success experience more negative postoutcome moods than persons making the opposite attributions. Three experiments assessed the CLH. Although outcomes consistently affected moods and attributions, attributions did not affect moods. Significant correlations consistent with the CLH were also infrequently obtained. Another theory, the sanctioned-object hypothesis (SOH), was proposed for understanding how causal attributions lead to mood changes. This hypothesis asserts that the application of positive or negative sanctions to objects in the perceptual field is a central determinant of mood and that attributions affect mood when their content and salience activate sanctioning processes. A fourth experiment evaluated the competing theories. The results supported the SOH but not the CLH. The findings are discussed in terms of their implications for understanding mood variations and the effects that moods have on the construction of attributions and for adopting methodological alternatives that may be valuable for future laboratory research studying mood variations.     

The role of social perspective in perceiving the causes of success and failure1

An experiment was conducted to test the hypothesis that observers' causal attributions about an actor's performance at a task would be affected by their social perspective in observing the situation. Observer subjects were either assigned to serve in a role comparable to that of observer-subjects in most actor-observer experiments or were assigned a distinctive role more divergent from the social perspective of the actor. As expected, observers with a similar social perspective to that of the actor made more flattering attributions about the actor's performance than observers with a dissimilar social perspective. We concluded that actor-observer differences in attribution for an actor's performance in any one experiment cannot be taken as definitive evidence either for or against the defensive attribution idea.     

Does scientific thinking lead to success and sanity? An integration of attribution and attributional models

A motivational model is introduced that integrates conceptions of attributional antecedents with those of attributional consequences, and suggests that it is functional to make realistic attributions. This model is applied to the analysis of achievement behaviour and depression. The use of a new experimental paradigm designed to test the model's assumptions demonstrates that realistic attributions maximise performance. The model was also used to investigate whether depressives are more realistic than non-depressives. This research revealed that depressives draw more "pessimistic" conclusions from covariation information than non-depressives. In addition, depressives expect their partners to make more negative attributions about the depressives' outcomes than their partners in fact do. However, these negative views could not be traced back to faulty inferences from covariation information. Finally, research is described showing that, in addition to depressogenic attributions, certain evaluative cognitions need to be present in order to trigger depressive mood reactions.     

Why Me? The Persistence of Negative Appraisals Over the Course of Illness1

This paper examines the relationship of illness appraisals and causal attributions to later psychological adjustment among individuals coping with a chronic illness. Data on threat and challenge appraisals, causal attributions, and depression were collected twice over an 18-month period from patients with recently diagnosed rheumatoid arthritis (RA). Appraisals and attributions were differentially related to psychological adjustment. Challenge appraisals were stable over time but were unrelated to depression. Internal, stable, global attributions about the diagnosis were associated with greater depression at follow-up for subjects who were initially high on the depression measure but were related to lowered depression for individuals with initially low depression. An interaction between initial threat appraisals and depression was also found for depression 18 months later. For individuals with low depression scores initially, threat appraisals were related to greater depression later; when initial depression was high, threat appraisals were unrelated to later depression. In addition, initial threat appraisals mediated the relationship between initial level of depression and rumination (continuing to ask, “Why me?”) 18 months later. These findings are discussed in terms of the failure to achieve some resolution about the place of the illness in one's life and of theories of dysphoric rumination that suggest that negative self-focus contributes to a continuing depressed mood.     

Patient attributions for cardiac events: predictors of physical and psychological recovery

This study examined cardiac rehabilitation (CR) patients' causal attributions for their cardiac events, and used those attributions as predictors of cross‐sectional and prospective health status. Data were collected from 163 participants at the beginning and end of their CR programs. Results showed that patients' attributions can be categorized into controllable ones that are behavioral in nature, uncontrollable ones that are biological in nature, and a separate category for stress‐related causes. Findings showed that stress attributions at the beginning of CR were associated with engaging in healthy behaviors in the last month of CR, which, in turn, were positively associated with metabolic equivalence levels at the end of CR. Results imply a motivational component to believing that cardiac events are caused by stress.     

Stroke patients' well-being as a function of caregiving spouses' helpful and unhelpful actions

This study examined the perceptions that 55 older married stroke patients had about themselves and about the motivations of their caregiving spouses when they judged their spouses' actions to be helpful and when they judged them to be unhelpful. It also examined how these perceptions were related to patients' well-being (depression, positive affect, marital satisfaction). Patients had more negative perceptions of themselves and of their spouses when they judged the actions to be unhelpful than when they judged them to be helpful. The hypothesis that perceptions about unhelpful actions would be more strongly related to patients' well-being than would perceptions about helpful actions was only partially supported. Perceptions about unhelpful actions were related to patients' depression, but perceptions about helpful actions were related to positive affect. Both kinds of perceptions were related to marital satisfaction. Findings begin to explicate the complex relationship between perceived helpfulness of actions and well-being.     

Diabetes Knowledge as a Moderator of Reactions to Illness by Patients With Insulin-Dependent Diabetes Mellitus1

We examined patient knowledge as a moderator of psychological reactions to illness among patients with insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus. We reasoned that knowledgeable patients would have the most severe reactions to their illness because the causal implications of good or poor metabolic control would be most apparent. Accordingly, we expected that more knowledgeable patients would react more negatively than less knowledgeable patients to poor metabolic control but would react more positively to good metabolic control. Results from a sample of 46 patients with insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus supported this hypothesis. These findings suggest that increased patient knowledge may not produce uniformly positive results. Patient education programs must consider the psychological implications of patient knowledge in addition to the physiological consequences.     

Political groups in contact: The role of attributions for outgroup attitudes in reducing antipathy

In two cross‐sectional surveys and one experiment, we tested the hypothesis that attributions for outgroup ideologies would mediate the relationship between quality of contact and reduced prejudice. In Study 1, a British sample (N = 85) rated their perceptions of, and attributions for, their political outgroup's (i.e., conservative or liberal) belief system. Supporting our hypothesis, the relationship between contact and outgroup attitudes was mediated by rationality attributions—attributions that outgroup members obtained their views via rational thought processes. Study 2 was a replication of Study 1 with an American sample (N = 229) and expanded construct measurement. The results of Study 2 replicated those of Study 1, showing support for rationality attributions as a mediator of the contact–prejudice link. In Study 3 (N = 132), we experimentally manipulated the priming of past positive or negative outgroup contact with individual outgroup members and measured the proposed mediational constructs with respect to that outgroup encounter. Results further supported the role of rationality attributions as mediators of the contact–prejudice link. The implications of these findings for perceptions and relations between antagonistic ideological groups are discussed. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Perceived stigma,self-blame,and adjustment among lung,breast and prostate cancer patients

People who suffer from disease have often been stigmatised. The internalisation of stigma leads to the experience of self-blame. The relationship among stigma, self-blame and adjustment was framed with two theoretical perspectives: the looking-glass self and learned helplessness models. These models were studied in 96 lung, 30 breast and 46 prostate cancer patients. Consistent with the looking-glass-self model, we predicted that perceived stigma and self-blame would be associated with poorer psychological adjustment; the data supported these hypotheses. Consistent with the learned helplessness model, we predicted that self-blame would mediate the link between perceived stigma and psychological adjustment; data supported these hypotheses. The mediation model explained a greater percentage of the variance in adjustment in the lung cancer sample compared to the breast and prostate cancer sample. Participants who reported internal causal attributions reported poorer psychological adjustment. Lung cancer patients were more likely than breast or prostate cancer patients to report internal causal attributions for their cancer. Future research and cancer care are discussed in light of these findings.     

The effects of psychological androgyny on attributions of causality for success and failure

Sixty female subjects and sixty male subjects, either sex-typed or androgynous, based on scores on the Bem Sex-Role Inventory (BSRI), made causal attributions for their own success or failure. Subjects also predicted future performance on a similar task. Sex differences were revealed which are only partially consistent with a cognitive-based expectancy model. It is suggested that outcome and ego involvement in the task are crucial factors in whether cognitive-based or more self-serving attributions are used in accounting for performance. Androgynous subjects predicted higher future performance. However, contrary to prediction, attributional behavior of androgynous and sex-typed subjects did not differ. Results are discussed in terms of rapidly changing views, in both the conceptualization and the measurement of psychological androgyny, since Bem's original report of behavioral correlates to scores on the BSRI.     

Hope and Burden among Latino Families of Adults with Schizophrenia

This study examined hope and family burden among Latino families of individuals with schizophrenia. The sample consisted of 54 family members, one family member per outpatient adult recruited from public mental health programs in a diverse urban community. Hierarchical linear regression analyses were used to test the hypothesis that the family member's increased hope for the patient's future would be associated with decreased family burden beyond effects explained by the patient's length of illness and severity of symptoms. Results supported the study hypothesis. Family hope for the patient's future was associated with four of five types of family burden. Findings point to the prominent role of hope as a source of resilience for Latino families dealing with severe mental illness of a loved one.     

The attributional response of males and females to noncontingent feedback

The attributions of male and female college student subjects following exposure to noncontingent, contingent, and no-feedback conditions were analyzed in a 2×3 multivariate analysis of variance. The experimental hypothesis was that exposure to noncontingent feedback would result in more depressive attributions than exposure to contingent feedback or to no feedback, and that this effect would be moderated by gender. The hypothesis was partially supported in that females receiving noncontingent feedback on a concept discrimination problem subsequently made more internal attributions for negative events than male subjects receiving noncontingent feedback and female subjects receiving contingent feedback or no feedback.     

Causal attributions and blame: associations with mothers' adjustment to the birth of a child with Down syndrome

The main purpose of this study is to explore the associations between causal attributions to others, blaming others and mothers' adjustment to the birth of a child with Down syndrome (DS). Participants (n?=?214) rated causal attributions to others and blaming others, and completed five measures of adjustment: anger, anxiety, depression, parenting stress, and attitudes towards the child. The adjustment of three groups of mothers was compared: (i) those who made no attributions to others (ii) those who made causal attributions but did not blame, and (iii) those who blamed others. Four years after the births of their children with DS, 16% of mothers blamed others and 17% made causal attributions but did not blame others for this outcome. Those who blamed others had higher levels of anger, anxiety, depression, parenting stress and more negative attitudes towards their children with DS than did those who made causal attributions but did not blame, and those who made who made no attributions to others. The adjustment of the latter two groups did not differ. Investigating blame rather than causal attributions may be a more fruitful area for future research aimed at understanding and facilitating adjustment to illness and other negative life events.     

Creeping dispositionism: the temporal dynamics of behavior prediction

Four studies tested the hypothesis that temporal distance increases the weight of global dispositions in predicting and explaining future behavior. Study 1 found that the correspondence bias was manifested more strongly in predictions of distant future behavior than of near future behavior. Study 2 found that participants predicted higher cross-situational consistency in distant future behavior than in near future behavior. Study 3 found that participants sought information about others' more global dispositions for predicting distant future than near future behavior. Finally, Study 4 found that participants made more global causal attributions for distant future outcomes than for near future outcomes. The results were interpreted as supporting the assumption of construal level theory that perceivers use more abstract representations (higher level construals) to predict and explain more distant future behaviors.     

Gender, Female Traditionality, Achievement Level, and Cognitions of Success and Failure

Differences in ratings of initial expectancy of success, perceived scholastic ability, and causal attributions were assessed for male and female high school students for a simulated academic test. Subjects were also differentiated on their achievement level (i.e., under- and overachievement) and the traditionality of their career aspirations. As predicted, higher expectancies were found for high performance achievers and nontraditional females. Males generally made more attributions to lack of effort for failure, as did low performance achievers. Females and high performance achievers attributed success more to effort. Hypotheses concerning differential usage of luck and ability attributions were not supported. Although there was an overall trend for females to be more external, traditionality also mediated causal attributions for females.     

The self-serving function of hypochondriacal complaints: physical symptoms as self-handicapping strategies

The present experiment tested the hypothesis that hypochondriacal individuals commonly use reports of physical illness and symptoms as a strategy to control attributions made about their performances in evaluative settings (i.e., self-handicapping strategies). Specifically, it was predicted that hypochondriacal individuals would report more recent physical illness and complaints and more current physical symptoms in an evaluative setting in which poor health could serve as an alternative explanation for poor performance than would either individuals in an evaluative setting in which poor health was precluded as an excuse or individuals in a nonevaluative setting. As predicted, results supported this self-protective pattern of complaints in a hypochondriacal sample but not in a nonhypochondriacal group. The self-protective role of hypochondriacal behavior is discussed in relation to other theory and research on the nature and treatment of hypochondriasis.     

Who deserves to be sick? An exploration of the relationships between belief in a just world, illness causal attributions and their fairness judgements

This research explored relationships between beliefs about justice, illness causal attributions and fairness judgements of those causes. Participants (n?=?200) completed questionnaires assessing their belief in a just world (BJW) and measuring causal attributions and fairness judgements for 42 illness causes classified into behavioural, environmental and hidden (genetic, mystic, psychosocial) categories. As predicted, BJW was correlated positively with all fairness judgements, but with none of the illness causal attributions. Behavioural causes of illness were judged to be fairer than environmental causes, which were judged fairer than hidden causes. Finally, for environmental and hidden causes (uncontrollable illness attributions), positive correlations between causal attributions and their corresponding fairness judgements were found only among participants with high BJW. Implications of these findings for decision makers and health professionals are discussed, with emphasis on the need to consider the combined effect of causal attributions and BJW on illness fairness judgements.