Sex differences in attribution: A Norwegian study

A quasi-experimental study was conducted to examine the effect of sex on actor and observer attributions of success and failure. It was predicted that, contrary to American results in similar studies, Norwegian males and females would tend to be largely similar in their attribution of success and failure. Only same-sex attributions were explored. Subjects were asked to attribute causality along a set of six standard causal dimensions. The results showed that sex had a relatively minor effect on attributions, compared to the effects of attributor role and task outcome. Only in their attributions of ability did men and women differ to some degree in that women were more likely to use lack of ability as an explanation for own failure. The study concludes that cross-cultural research is needed in order to better assess the normative impact on attribution.     

Exploring sex differences in expectancy,attribution, and academic achievement

Two studies were carried out to explore if sex differences in expectancy and attribution of achievement are related to sex differences in academic performance. Study I investigated expectancy and attribution of achievement, operationalized as grade point index, among 176 male and 116 female college freshmen. Men were found to form higher expectations for future grades. Attributions measured through assigning percentage weights to ability, luck, effort, and difficulty as causal explanations of one's grade point index showed that men make more ability and women more effort attributions. Despite these differences in expectancy and attribution patterns, men and women were found not to differ in their performance. In Study II 120 college freshmen, half of them male, half female, filled out questionnaires before and after a midterm examination. A subsample of 49 also completed the Bem Sex Role Inventory. The results basically confirm the previous study's findings, except in Study II, men and women gave equally high weights to effort as a cause. The results also show that a feminine sex-role orientation is associated with a debilitating pattern of expectancy and attribution and lower performance, especially among women. Implications of the results for unraveling inconsistencies in the attribution literature and for a need to clarify connotations of femininity are discussed.The author wishes to express her gratitude to the members of the Psychology and Guidance Division of the College of Basic Studies, Boston University, for their assistance in preparing the questionnaire and collecting the data for Study I. Research for Study II was supported by grant MH 31181-01 from the National Institute of Mental Health. Mark Nachbar provided assistance in analyzing the data to both studies. Jan Mokros, Joseph Pleck, and Dan Jaquette provided valuable comments on an earlier version of this article.     

A serious misunderstanding: synchronicity and the generation of meaning

Abstract: This paper points to the problem caused by the fact that numerous academic ‘Jung studies’ are conducted on the basis of the English translation of Jung's works without any knowledge of his original texts and illustrates it with the misconstrual that Jung's concept of synchronicity suffered in the studies of many recent authors, as exemplified by two articles in the September 2011 issue of the JAP. The translation of ‘sinngemäße Koinzidenz’ as ‘meaningful coincidence’ seduced those writers to take synchronistic ‘meaning’ as meaning the meaningfulness of life or even as ‘transcendent meaning’, which is incompatible with Jung's synchronicity concept, and to replace Jung's strictly intellectual project of establishing an explanatory principle for synchronistic events (in addition to the principle of causality for all other events) by the fundamentally different project of focusing on the impact that such events may have for the experiencing subjective mind, on ‘human meaning‐making’, and, with a decidedly anti‐intellectual bias, of hoping for ‘shifts into non‐rational states of mind’.     

The process of sex attribution

Sex attribution is defined as any explanation of behavior that specifies sex of the performer as a causal agent. A method is described for assessing appropriate and inappropriate occasions for making sex attributions, and several hypotheses related to their occurrence are advanced. As predicted, sex attributions occurred most frequently when a person stated a preference that was “sex appropriate” on an empirical basis for someone of his/her sex. Consistent with claims of the Women's Movement, the findings indicate that men are more likely than women to make inappropriate sex attributions. Unexpectedly, however, this bias occurred only when men were judging the attitudes of other males.     

Understanding causal conditionals: A study of individual differences

Previous studies have suggested that a minority of university students, of lower cognitive ability, are inclined to interpret abstract conditional statements, if p then q, as if they were conjunctions: p and q. In the present study we administered the conditional truth table task to a large sample of students (n = 160), but using realistic, everyday causal conditionals. We also measured their general intelligence. While individual differences were found, these were not consistent with some participants adopting a conjunctive interpretation of such statements. Rather, it appears that students of lower cognitive ability are rather likely to assume that a conditional implies its converse, so that it means also if q then p. The results are discussed with reference to the suppositional theory of conditionals and our more general account of hypothetical thinking.     

Sex differences in attribution for occupational success

A study was conducted to both test and extend Deaux's (Sex: A perspective on the attribution process. In J. H. Harvey, W. J. Ickes, & R. F. Kidd, (Eds.), New directions in attribution research, Volume 1. Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum, 1976) expectancy model of sex-linked differences in attribution for success. Specifically, it was hypothesized that female occupational subjects would attribute success more to the unstable causes of effort and luck, as well as the stable internal cause of interpersonal skill, while male occupational subjects would make higher attributions to the stable causes of ability and task ease. This hypothesis was supported for the causes of effort, luck, and task ease. Additionally, a comparison between sex differences in attribution occurring within a nonpersonal vs. personal frame of reference showed three of the expected sex differences in attribution to be stronger in the latter condition. Moreover, it was shown that this difference was largely accounted for by changes in females' rather than males' attributions. A final hypothesis, namely, that males would perceive themselves as more successful in their occupations than females, was not confirmed.     

Everyday memory failure: age differences in appraisal and attribution

A person perception paradigm was used to test 86 young and 84 older Ss for evidence of a double standard in appraising everyday memory failures of young and older targets. Vignettes were judged on separate Likert scales for possible attributions for the failure (ability, effort, task difficulty, chance, and 2 measures of attention), signs of mental difficulty, need for memory training, and indications of need for professional evaluation. Results confirmed a double standard used by young and old: The failures of older targets were judged as signifying greater mental difficulty and greater need for memory training than were the identical failures of young targets. Older Ss were more lenient overall than young Ss in their appraisals. Young Ss judged target persons' memory failures as signifying more mental difficulty, and they more readily recommend professional evaluation.     

Simulation in hypnosis research: the "hidden" role of attribution of meaning

The role played by attribution of meaning in research involving simulation is examined. Acknowledgement of this role, lacking to date, queries the traditional use of simulation but also opens up interesting research questions.     

Ambiguity between self and other: Individual differences in action attribution

Individuals differ in their ability to attribute actions to self or other. This variance is thought to explain, in part, the experience of voice-hearing. Misattribution can also be context-driven. For example, causal ambiguity can arise when the actions of two or more individuals are coordinated and produce similar effects (e.g., music-making). Experience in such challenging contexts may refine skills of action attribution. Forty participants completed a novel finger-tapping task which parametrically manipulated the proportion of control that ‘self’ versus ‘other’ possessed over resulting auditory tones. Results showed that action misattribution peaked in the middle of the self-to-other continuum and was biased towards other. This pattern was related to both high hallucination-proneness and to low musical-experience. Findings suggest not only that causal ambiguity plays a key role in agency but also that action attribution abilities may improve with practice, potentially providing an avenue for remediation of the positive symptoms of schizophrenia.     

Sex differences in risk taking and its attribution

In the original Kogan-Wallach Choice Dilemmas Questionnaire (CDQ), an oftused measure of risk-taking disposition, the central character in the majority of items is male. For this study, a revised 10-item CDQ was constructed with content appropriate for both sexes. Two forms were employed, identical in all respects except for the use of a male or female name to identify the central protagonist in each CDQ item. When the two forms were administered to male and female undergraduates, the female form elicited somewhat higher levels of risk taking. This effect was especially pronounced in the male subjects. When asked to specify how their peers would respond to each of the CDQ items, subjects attributed greater caution to female than to male peers relative to their own preferred risk level. The outcomes suggest that subjects (especially males) find highly achieving women in the CDQ items more exceptional than their male counterparts, and hence able to tolerate more risk. In striking contrast, subjects' female peers are considered a rather cautious lot.The present research was formulated in the course of discussions with Marvin Frankel. The authors are enormously grateful for his help and would also like to thank Kathleen Connor and Joel Kostin for their aid in statistical and computer analyses. An earlier version of of this article was presented as a paper at the annual convention of the American Psychological Association, Chicago, 1975. The article was completed during the period (1976–1977) that the senior author was a Visiting Scholar in the Department of Psychology, University of California, Berkeley.     

Sex differences in performance attribution and contingency judgment

In two studies, male and female subjects were given attribution measures before and after performance on a novel finger maze. Neither study revealed any sex differences in expectancy and anticipated attributions prior to maze performance. In Experiment 1, no sex differences in attributions were obtained regardless of whether the outcome was success or failure. In Experiment 2, where the outcome was made completely noncontingent on behavior, females had greater illusion of control as well as higher luck attribution. This paradoxical finding was interpreted as reflecting females' tendency to depend on external and internal attributions simultaneously.The data presented here are based on a larger research project on reinforcement contingencies and performance attributions supported by a research grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.     

Understanding strategy differences in a fault-finding task

This article examines strategy choices for how people find faults in a simple device by using models of several strategies and new data. Diag, a model solving this task, used a single strategy that predicted the behavior of most participants in a previous study with remarkable accuracy. This article explores additional strategies used in this reasoning task that arise when less directive instructions are provided. Based on our observations, five new strategies for the task were identified and described by being modeled. These different strategies, realized in different models, predict the speed of solution while the participant is learning the task, and were validated by comparing their predictions to the observations (r² = .27 to .90). The results suggest that participants not only created different strategies for this simple fault-finding task but that some also, with practice, shifted between strategies. This research provides insights into how strategies are an important aspect of the variability in learning, illustrates the transfer of learning on a problem-by-problem level, and shows that the noisiness that most learning curves show can arise from differential transfer between problems.     

A study of the dynamics of sex differences in adulthood

Studies of gender differences using primarily young individuals show that males, on average, perform better than females in physical activities but worse than females on tests of verbal abilities. There is however a controversy about the existence of these sex differences in adulthood. Our study used 1271 participants from four cultural backgrounds (Chinese, multi‐generation Canadians, Indu‐Canadians, and European‐Canadians) divided in five age groups. We measured sex differences in the time required for participants to complete a lexical task experiment, and also assessed their verbal tempo and physical endurance using a validated temperament test (Structure of Temperament Questionnaire). We found a significant female advantage in time on the lexical task and on the temperament scale of social–verbal tempo, and a male advantage on the temperament scale of physical endurance. These sex differences, however, were more pronounced in young age groups (17–24), fading in older groups. This “middle age–middle sex” phenomenon suggests that sex differences in these two types of abilities observed in younger groups might be “a matter of age,” and should not be attributed to gender in general. A one‐dimensional approach to sex differences (common in meta‐analytic studies) therefore overlooks a possible interaction of sex differences with age.     

The contingent smile: a meta-analysis of sex differences in smiling

The authors present a meta-analysis of sex differences in smiling based on 448 effect sizes derivedfrom 162 research reports. There was a statistically significant tendency for women and adolescent girls to smile more than men and adolescent boys (d = 0.41). The authors hypothesized that sex differences in smiling would be larger when concerns about gender-appropriate behavior were made more conspicuous, situational constraints were absent or ambiguous, or emotion (especially negative) was salient. It was also predicted that the size of the sex difference in smiling would vary by culture and age. Moderator analysis supported these predictions. Although men tend to smile less than women, the degree to which this is so is contingent on rules and roles.     

Social roles and social perception: individual differences in attribution and error

In a replication of the social roles experiment by Ross, Amabile, and Steinmetz (1977), 103 male and female 14-year-olds viewed a brief videotape that showed a randomly assigned "questioner" asking general knowledge questions of a "contestant," who answered most of them incorrectly. Subjects subsequently manifested the role-based attribution error of attributing significantly more knowledge and ability to the arbitrarily designated questioner than to the arbitrarily designated contestant, and this effect was stronger among girls than boys. Personality data were available on the subjects for when they were in nursery school and again at age 14 in the form of independent Q-sort ratings. Personality correlates of the role effect were stronger among boys but manifested a basically similar pattern among girls and suggested that those most prone to make this attribution error, far from being disadvantaged in social judgment, tended to be more socially engaged and competent as well as emotionally well adjusted. The role effect was also positively associated with self-esteem. Personality correlates of attributional generosity and the tendency to attribute high ability to stimulus persons were associated with generally positive interpersonal qualities and attitudes. Results were interpreted in terms of usually appropriate heuristic social competencies that, in special circumstances, may sometimes underlie attribution errors. The general usefulness of examining individual differences in research on social cognition was noted.     

An fMRI study of sex differences in regional activation to a verbal and a spatial task

Sex differences in cognitive performance have been documented, women performing better on some phonological tasks and men on spatial tasks. An earlier fMRI study suggested sex differences in distributed brain activation during phonological processing, with bilateral activation seen in women while men showed primarily left-lateralized activation. This blood oxygen level-dependent fMRI study examined sex differences (14 men, 13 women) in activation for a spatial task (judgment of line orientation) compared to a verbal-reasoning task (analogies) that does not typically show sex differences. Task difficulty was manipulated. Hypothesized ROI-based analysis documented the expected left-lateralized changes for the verbal task in the inferior parietal and planum temporal regions in both men and women, but only men showed right-lateralized increase for the spatial task in these regions. Image-based analysis revealed a distributed network of cortical regions activated by the tasks, which consisted of the lateral frontal, medial frontal, mid-temporal, occipitoparietal, and occipital regions. The activation was more left lateralized for the verbal and more right for the spatial tasks, but men also showed some left activation for the spatial task, which was not seen in women. Increased task difficulty produced more distributed activation for the verbal and more circumscribed activation for the spatial task. The results suggest that failure to activate the appropriate hemisphere in regions directly involved in task performance may explain certain sex differences in performance. They also extend, for a spatial task, the principle that bilateral activation in a distributed cognitive system underlies sex differences in performance.     

Infant sex differences: Ecological effects

Mothers and their firstborn. year-old infants (30 girls, 30 boys) were observed during two counterbalanced situations. In the nonavailability situation, mothers were not to initiate interaction; during free play, mothers were free to interact. As in previous studies, sex differences in infant touching and proximity seeking appeared, dependent here upon the level of interaction, with girls higher on both measures. Boys and girls did not differ during free play. Sex differences in maternal behavior were rare in either situation. Moreover, the pattern of associations between maternal and infant behavior changed as the level of interaction changed. Maternal availability, manipulated by experimental instructions, should be considered as a factor in interpreting investigations of early sex differences.