Desire for Control and the Use of Attribution Processes

ABSTRACT The hypothesis that people engage in attribution processes to obtain a sense of control was tested In each of three experiments, subjects identified on an individual difference measure as high in a general desire for control (DC) were found to engage in attnbution processes more than subjects low in desire for control In Experiment 1, high-DC subjects were more likely to utilize attributionally relevant information when describing the cause of a writer's behavior than were low-DC subjects High-DC subjects in Experiment 2 were more likely to ask attribution questions about hypothetical events than were low-DC subjects In Expenment 3, high-DC subjects gave more attributions for their performance on a test than did low-DC subjects The findings are interpreted as support for the control motivation explanation for why people engage in attribution processes     

The other way around: Effects of causal attributions on estimates of consensus,distinctiveness, and consistency

It was hypothesized that the attributed cause of a given person's behavior will affect inferences about its generalizability over persons (consensus), stimuli (distinctiveness), and circumstances (consistency). Moreover, these effects were expected to parallel the effects of consensus, distinctiveness, and consistency information on causal attributions. Experiment 1 provided support for these predictions but also showed that attribution affected consensus judgments less than it affected judgments of distinctiveness and consistency, particularly when consensus was not the first characteristic estimated. Using a different set of stimulus materials and a different manipulation of attribution, Experiments 2 and 3 provided further evidence for the effects of attribution on inferences of consensus information. Experiment 3 indicated that the false consensus effect—actors' tendency to assume that the majority of people share their behavior—may be due to actors' tendency to attribute their behavior to situational factors. Implications of the present studies for biased estimates of consensus and the use of consensus and attribution as mediating variables are discussed.     

消费者触摸渴望的形成机制解析——基于认知体验视角

对消费者触摸渴望形成机制的探讨, 有利于线上和线下企业制定如何补偿和满足消费者触摸渴望的营销战略。迄今, 关于消费者触摸渴望形成机制的探讨主要从信息加工视角、动机视角、决策视角以及先天观视角着手。但这些视角均不能解释为何同一消费者在不同认知体验下在触摸行为反应上的差异。本文提出个人控制受威胁感这一认知体验是消费者触摸渴望形成的前因变量。具体而言, 本文发现, 个人控制受威胁感这一负性认知体验会导致消费者触摸渴望的增加, 内在机制是为了满足对环境的控制需求(实验1, 2)。本文进一步发现, 当强化消费者的自我价值后, 他们对环境的控制需求下降了, 因此消费者的触摸渴望将不再受个人控制受威胁感的影响(实验3)。最后, 本文还发现, 强化自我价值对个人控制受威胁感与消费者触摸渴望间关系的调节作用仅在高自尊者(vs.低自尊者)身上出现(实验4)。论文结尾讨论了本文所关注的个人控制受威胁感这一认知体验视角对已有触觉研究、已有个人控制感研究等的理论贡献。     

Agency attributions of mental effort during self-regulated learning

Previous results suggest that the monitoring of one’s own performance during self-regulated learning is mediated by self-agency attributions and that these attributions can be influenced by poststudy effort-framing instructions. These results pose a challenge to the study of issues of self-agency in metacognition when the objects of self-regulation are mental operations rather than motor actions that have observable outcomes. When participants studied items in Experiment 1 under time pressure, they invested greater study effort in the easier items in the list. However, the effects of effort framing were the same as when learners typically invest more study effort in the more difficult items: Judgments of learning (JOLs) decreased with effort when instructions biased the attribution of effort to nonagentic sources but increased when they biased attribution to agentic sources. However, the effects of effort framing were constrained by parameters of the study task: Interitem differences in difficulty constrained the attribution of effort to agentic regulation (Experiment 2) whereas interitem differences in the incentive for recall constrained the attribution of effort to nonagentic sources (Experiment 3). The results suggest that the regulation and attribution of effort during self-regulated learning occur within a module that is dissociated from the learner’s superordinate agenda but is sensitive to parameters of the task. A model specifies the stage at which effort framing affects the effort–JOL relationship by biasing the attribution of effort to agentic or nonagentic sources. The potentialities that exist in metacognition for the investigation of issues of self-agency are discussed.     

A lag between understanding false belief and emotion attribution in young children: Relationships with linguistic ability and mothers' mental‐state language

This study examines the contribution of children's linguistic ability and mothers' use of mental‐state language to young children's understanding of false belief and their subsequent ability to make belief‐based emotion attributions. In Experiment 1, children (N = 51) were given three belief‐based emotion‐attribution tasks. A standard task in which the protagonist was a story character and the emotional outcomes were imagined, and two videos in which the story protagonist was a real infant and the emotional outcomes were observable (high and low expressed emotion conditions). Children's verbal ability (semantic competence) was also measured. In Experiment 2, children (N = 75) were given two belief‐based emotion tasks: the standard story task and the high expressed emotion video. In addition, children's verbal ability (syntactic competence) and mothers' use of mental‐state attributes when describing their children were also measured. The results showed that: (1) the lag between understanding false belief and emotion attribution was a stable feature of children's reasoning across the three tests; and (2) children who were more linguistically advanced and whose mothers' described them in more mentalistic terms were more likely to understand the association between false belief and emotion. The findings underline the continuing importance of verbal ability and linguistic input for children's developing theory‐of‐mind understanding, even after they display an understanding of false belief.     

“This story is right on”: The impact of regulatory fit on narrative engagement and persuasion

When people read a story, feelings of rightness from regulatory fit (consistency between regulatory state and strategic means) could suggest that the story is “right on” relative to feelings of wrongness from regulatory nonfit. Under these conditions, individuals who are experiencing feelings of rightness should engage more with the narrative and be more persuaded by its implicit messages. Results from two experiments supported these hypotheses. Participants in Experiment 1 were more mentally engaged (transported) by the story when they experienced regulatory fit. We replicated this effect in Experiment 2 and extended it to endorsement of story‐consistent beliefs, an indicator of persuasion via narratives. Additionally, we found that drawing participants' attention to an earlier event as a source of feelings of rightness eliminated the regulatory fit effects on transportation and persuasion, suggesting attribution of feelings of regulatory fit/nonfit to the plausibility of the narrative world. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

When faces and voices come together: Face width-to-height ratio and voice pitch contribute independently to social perception

Prior research has shown that the face's width-to-height ratio (fWHR) and the voice's pitch influence social perception. Yet, the relative contribution of either cue has been largely unexplored. We examined the simultaneous effects of fWHR and pitch on social evaluations. Experiment 1 (N = 102) tested how such cues shaped global impressions. Experiment 2 (N = 121) tested fWHR and pitch's effect on behavioural affiliative intentions, framing social interaction as a physical or an intellectual competition. Experiment 3 (N = 57) assessed whether variations in fWHR and pitch could influence trait attribution (i.e., physical formidability and intelligence). Individuals with large faces or low-pitched voices elicited negative impressions, positive behavioural intentions in a physical competition, and the attribution of stronger formidability but lower intelligence. Across the studies, cues exerted independent effects. The implications of these findings for research on cross-modal social perception are discussed.     

Conflicting desire and the child's theory of mind

We contrast the standard representational theory-of-mind approach to the understanding of mental states with an alternative view that theory-of-mind tasks require executive functioning or the inhibition of more “cognitively salient” information. Two experiments test the hypothesis that 3-year-olds' apparent problems on theory-of-mind tasks are not due to an inability to represent the mental contents of another, but rather lie in the informational structure of the task. In Experiment 1, 3- to 5-year-olds were tested on their understanding of desire in others either when they themselves held a strong and conflicting desire or when they had no strong desire. Results showed that under the condition of having a strong and conflicting desire, only 5-year-olds were able to recognize that another person may desire something different. In contrast, when the children themselves held no strong desire, even 3-year-olds were able to judge another's desire correctly. Experiment 2 compared 3-year-olds' performance on a standard false-belief task with an equivalently structured desire task in which participants had again to inhibit their own strong and conflicting desire. Results showed similar performance on the traditional false-belief task and the new conflicting-desire task.     

The relationship between the structural mere exposure effect and the implicit learning process

Three experiments are reported that investigate the relationship between the structural mere exposure effect (SMEE) and implicit learning in an artificial grammar task. Subjects were presented with stimuli generated from a finite-state grammar and were asked to memorize them. In a subsequent test phase subjects were required first to rate how much they liked novel items, and second whether or not they thought items conformed to the rules of the grammar. A small but consistent effect of grammaticality was found on subjects' liking ratings (a "structural mere exposure effect") in all three experiments, but only when encoding and testing conditions were consistent. A change in the surface representation of stimuli between encoding and test (Experiment 1), memorizing fragments of items and being tested on whole items (Experiment 2), and a mismatch of processing operations between encoding and test (Experiment 3) all removed the SMEE. In contrast, the effect of grammaticality on rule judgements remained intact in the face of all three manipulations. It is suggested that rule judgements reflect attempts to explicitly recall information about training items, whereas the SMEE can be explained in terms of an attribution of processing fluency.     

Causal attribution, cognitive interference, and the generalization of learned helplessness

We assessed the role of off-task cognitions in mediating the performance effects of global and specific attributions for failure. In Experiment 1, subjects were divided into global and specific attributors and were exposed to either no feedback or failure feedback. In Experiment 2, subjects were exposed to no feedback or to unsolvable problems wherein they received attribution for failure to specific or global causes. Experiment 3 added a condition in which subjects were restrained from engaging in off-task cognitions. Results showed that exposure to unsolvable problems deteriorated performance and increased off-task cognitions mainly among subjects who attributed failure to global causes. In addition, the enhancement of off-task cognitions interfered with performance following unsolvable problems. The introduction of instructions that discouraged subjects from engaging in off-task cognitions eliminated the detrimental effects of global attribution. Results are discussed in terms of test anxiety and excuse-making conceptualizations of learned helplessness.     

The recall of stereotypes: the effects of incidentally activated directed forgetting instructions

Based on the automotive model (J. A. Bargh, 1990) and the directed forgetting paradigm, the present study investigated whether incidentally activated forget and remember cues can lead to similar effects as explicitly given instructions. To this end, the present paper attempted to replicate the findings of Macrae, Bodenhausen, Milne, and Ford (1997) employing their category primes (child abuser, neutral), study lists (List 1, List 2), and procedure. Using explicit directed forgetting instructions, Experiment 1 showed that the recall of the stereotypically relevant words (List 1) was higher when participants were given a remember than a forget instruction. This effect was found regardless of the prime conditions. Similarly, Experiment 2 showed that participants in the child abuser and neutral prime conditions recalled more stereotypically relevant words (List 1) when they were implicitly cued to remember than to forget these words. Experiment 3 showed that cognitively busy participants in the child-abuser, but not in the neutral prime condition, recalled more to-be-forgotten stereotypical words than nonbusy participants. These results are consistent with Macrae et al. s findings, and show that the effects of directed forgetting instructions are similar regardless of whether they were given explicitly or were activated incidentally. Results are discussed in relation to stereotype maintenance.     

Partitioned Presentation of Multicomponent Bundle Prices: Evaluation,Choice and Underlying Processing Effects

Firms may choose to present the price of a multicomponent product bundle in partitioned (separate price for each mandatory component) or consolidated (single, equivalent price) fashion. In this article, we report on 2 experiments that examined the effects of such presentations on evaluations and choices as well as the underlying processing effects. In Experiment 1, consistent with a mental accounting analysis, a multicomponent product bundle was evaluated more favorably and chosen more often when its components were presented with partitioned (vs. consolidated) prices. The effects were, however, moderated by the component partitioned. In particular, it appeared that partitioning prices altered attention paid to the components partitioned and related product features. In Experiment 2, we found that different splits of the bundle price influenced evaluations and choices depending on how the focal product price related to that of a comparison option. These price‐split effects were also moderated by the component partitioned, suggesting attention effects similar to Experiment 1. The findings show that although the effects of price partitioning were consistent with mental accounting principles, they were moderated by information processing effects related to the partitioned component.     

Best friends: children use mutual gaze to identify friendships in others

This study examined children's ability to use mutual eye gaze as a cue to friendships in others. In Experiment 1, following a discussion about friendship, 4-, 5-, and 6-year-olds were shown animations in which three cartoon children looked at one another, and were told that one target character had a best friend. Although all age groups accurately detected the mutual gaze between the target and another character, only 5- and 6-year-olds used this cue to infer friendship. Experiment 2 replicated the effect with 5- and 6-year-olds when the target character was not explicitly identified. Finally, in Experiment 3, where the attribution of friendship could only be based on synchronized mutual gaze, 6-year-olds made this attribution, while 4- and 5-year-olds did not. Children occasionally referred to mutual eye gaze when asked to justify their responses in Experiments 2 and 3, but it was only by the age of 6 that reference to these cues correlated with the use of mutual gaze in judgements of affiliation. Although younger children detected mutual gaze, it was not until 6 years of age that children reliably detected and justified mutual gaze as a cue to friendship.     

Power increases the self-serving bias in the attribution of collective successes and failures

Three studies test the effect of power on the self-serving bias in attributing collective outcomes. The first two studies measure (Experiment 1) and manipulate (Experiment 2) power and then measure the internal (vs. external) attribution of past successes and failures. Consistently, those who feel powerful show a stronger self-serving tendency to selectively attribute successes internally and failures externally than those who feel powerless. Experiment 3 compares the effects of power (control over others) and personal control (over oneself). We find that power increases the self-serving bias, but a lack of control can limit this effect by reducing the external attribution of failures. Presumably, people who lack control are disinclined to attribute outcomes—including failures—externally because doing so would further aggravate their lack of control. Together, these results suggest that power increases a bias in the attribution of success and failure and thus presents a fundamental challenge to good leadership.     

How fatiguing is dispositional suppression? Disentangling the effects of procedural rebound and ego‐depletion

Recent work has shown that correcting a dispositional inference may lead social observers to over‐emphasize the role of dispositional factors in subsequent judgments. This effect has been explained as a procedural rebound following a phase of dispositional suppression. We conducted two experiments to test an alternative explanation in terms of ego‐depletion. In Experiment 1, we compared the effects of ego‐depletion and dispositional rebound by relying on the attitude attribution paradigm and the cookie paradigm. In Experiment 2, we turned to a difficult math task in order to induce fatigue. We were able to replicate the dispositional rebound and the ego‐depletion effects but none of the experiments supported an ego‐depletion explanation of post‐suppression dispositional rebound. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The role of the counterfactually satisfied desire in the lag between false‐belief and false‐emotion attributions in children aged 4–7

A robust lag was evidenced between the attribution to an individual of a false belief about the world and the attribution of the false emotion associated with this false belief (Bradmetz & Schneider, 1999). This lag was unexpected in the frame of current theories of mind which consider that emotion has a rational cognitive basis. The present paper refers to the theory of appraisal which links emotion to the belief about desire satisfaction rather than the belief concerning the state of the world. The authors claim that, even if counterfactual belief is understood, the associated emotion and belief about counterfactual satisfaction of desire are not automatically understood because they depend on the success of an action. Two experiments conducted on happiness, fear, and anger confirmed this view: Attributing false belief about counterfactual desire satisfaction is much more difficult than attributing false belief about a current state of affairs, and the emotion attributed to the individual is more closely linked to a belief about desire than to a belief about the world. A four‐step developmental sequence is proposed, and the link between action and realist bias is discussed.     

I'm Embarrassed for You: The Effect of Valuing and Perspective Taking on Empathic Embarrassment and Empathic Concern

Much research has investigated the cognitive‐perceptual factors that promote empathic concern. However, little research has investigated such factors for a related emotion: empathic embarrassment. We suggest that 2 factors promote empathic embarrassment for a target in a compromising situation: liking the target, and imagining oneself in the target's situation. Results revealed that liking a socially compromised target increases both empathic concern and empathic embarrassment (Experiment 1). Furthermore, imagining the person's thoughts and feelings increases empathic concern and a desire for future exposure to the person, whereas imagining oneself in the person's situation primarily increases empathic embarrassment (Experiment 2). Implications of these results for future empathy research and applications for those who suffer from chronic embarrassability are discussed.     

Concurrent Movement Impairs Incidental But Not Intentional Statistical Learning

The effect of concurrent movement on incidental versus intentional statistical learning was examined in two experiments. In Experiment 1, participants learned the statistical regularities embedded within familiarization stimuli implicitly, whereas in Experiment 2 they were made aware of the embedded regularities and were instructed explicitly to learn these regularities. Experiment 1 demonstrated that while the control group were able to learn the statistical regularities, the resistance‐free cycling group and the exercise group did not demonstrate learning. This is in contrast with the findings of Experiment 2, where all three groups demonstrated significant levels of learning. The results suggest that the movement demands, rather than the physiological stress, interfered with statistical learning. We suggest movement activates the striatum, which is not only responsible for motor control but also plays a role in incidental learning.     

Effects of role model deservingness on overcoming performance deficits induced by stereotype threat

Previous research has shown that exposure to successful role models can restore performance that had been impaired by stereotype threat, and that some role models are more effective than others. The present research examined the effects of role model deservingness on women's mathematics test performance after being placed under stereotype threat. In Experiment 1, a woman who attained success by herself (deserved) proved a more effective role model than an equally likable and successful woman whose success was handed to her (not deserved). In Experiment 2, women role models proved more effective at combating stereotype threat when their successes were attributable to internal‐stable (deserved) than external‐unstable (not deserved) causes, an effect that was partially mediated by reduction in extra‐task thinking. The results are seen as having implications for theories of stereotype threat and causal attribution. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.