New Directions in Attribution Research

Volume 2

J. H. Harvey, W. J. Ickes, R. F. Kidd, J. H. Harvey, W. J. Ickes, R. F. Kidd

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2018
• Topic: Psychology
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134919451
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Published in 1976, New Directions in Attribution Research is a valuable contribution to the field of Social Psychology.

I	ATTRIBUTION AT THE PERSONAL LEVEL

At the personal level, attributional processes are central to the individual’s construction of a personal reality. To a large extent, the structure and meaning of the events experienced by an individual derive from attributional analyses that are often subtle and complex. Phenomenologically, such analyses may at times appear to be fully represented in the person’s consciousness. These occasions may typify only one end of a continuum, however; since on other occasions the analyses seem to occur partially, if not entirely, out of conscious awareness. The meanings and consequent behaviors following from such analyses often indicate that a logical, rational integration of information has occurred. Frequently, however, the attributional process may appear to be less rational and at times may even be characterized as “biased.”

Whether apparent biases in attribution reflect real distortions in information processing or merely the individual’s attempt to rationally integrate information about the external environment with information supplied by various internal states is a question of much current interest. It is also a question that, for the most part, has yet to be answered. The available evidence increasingly suggests that in order to achieve an adequate understanding of attribution at the personal level, both internal and external informational inputs must be taken into account. As the chapters in the present and subsequent sections of this volume indicate, attention to both sources of information will not only help to elucidate the more general processes by which attributions are made, but may also help to elucidate the more unique and idiosyncratic aspects of personal experience that have typically been characterized as phenomenological.

The phenomenological emphasis is perhaps most evident in the first chapter of this section, “Is It Real?,” in which Philip Brickman poses an attributional question of the most elemental sort: “How do people decide whether something is real or not?” Brickman contends that the answer to this question, far from being a strictly metaphysical concern, is actually of central interest and importance to the field of social psychology. After reviewing the kinds of errors people commonly make in their attribution of reality to various events, Brickman suggests that such attributions are based on the implicit application of two basic criteria – internal correspondence and external correspondence – to one’s experience of the event in question. His elaboration of these theoretical criteria is quite provocative, indicating not only how they may provide the basis for such experiential states as alienation and fantasy but also how their relative importance in defining reality may vary as a function of such factors as age, sex, and the difference between the actor and the observer perspectives. Brickman’s chapter concludes with a discussion of the importance of establishing a sense of reality of “phenomenological validity” in social psychological research – a discussion in which he emphasizes the potential value of games for the study of human behavior.

Brickman has noted a bit wryly that research in the area of attribution reveals that “people make attributions about almost everything” – the category “almost everything” now including the subjective experience of “reality.” But are these manifold inferences always made at the level of conscious awareness? Ellen Langer, in her chapter “Rethinking the Role of Thought in Social Interaction,” suggests that they are not. In sharp contrast to the implicit and widely held assumption that attributional processes must be represented in a consciously elaborated sequence in order to influence behavior, Langer’s assumption is that much of human behavior is “mindless” and largely unconscious – even behavior that would seem to follow only from a complex sequence of information processing. She contends, in line with the script approach proposed by Robert Abelson, that habitually recurring sequences of behavior are gradually “chunked together” to form a smaller set of cognitive units that the individual can over-learn. Following extensive experience, the person’s awareness of certain key features that typify and cognitively symbolize the essence of common behavioral sequences eventually becomes sufficient, in and of itself, to trigger automatically a complex series of responses that may appear quite “mindful” to an outside observer but are actually quite mindless from the standpoint of the actor’s awareness of them. Langer shows us the other side of this coin, however, by describing a series of studies which indicate that individuals may behave inappropriately and thus reveal their “thoughtlessness,” when they rely only on the scripted aspects of situations to guide them on occasions in which these scripted cues are misleading or inappropriate.

The notion that cognitive cues may elicit fairly stereotyped responses is also apparent in the subsequent chapter by Bernard Weiner, Dan Russell, and David Lerman. In “Affective Consequences of Causal Ascriptions,” these authors propose that stereotyped affective reactions to achievement-related outcomes may be directly elicited by the ascription of the outcomes to specific causal factors. The results of their preliminary research suggest, for example, that the typical affective responses to a success outcome may vary greatly. A person may report a feeling of competence when the outcome is attributed to his own ability, self-enhancement when it is attributed to his personality, gratitude when it is attributed to another person, and surprise when it is attributed to luck. Similarly, the person may report a wide range of affective reactions to a failure outcome as well. He may feel incompetent if he attributes it to his lack of ability, resigned if he attributes it to his personality, aggressive if he attributes it to another person, and surprised if he attributes it to luck. In addition to discussing the possible relevance of their findings to the contemporary study of emotion, Weiner, Russell, and Lerman examine their implications for clinical psychology and the study of achievement motivation and suggest some intriguing directions for future research.

If people’s emotions and motivations are affected by their attributions, the reverse may also be true – attributions may be influenced by motivational factors. In their chapter, “Attributional Egotism,” Melvin Snyder, Walter Stephan, and David Rosenfìeld examine motivation to take credit for success and deny blame for failure. The motive to make an egocentric attribution depends on the presence of two necessary factors: (1) the attribution of a valanced (+ or −) outcome to the person; and (2) the perceived relevance of the attribution to the person’s self-esteem. They argue that whether egotism actually occurs depends not only on the presence of the motive but also on the perceived probability of successfully protecting or enhancing self-esteem and on the strength of conflicting motives. It is also important to consider where the attributor’s sympathies lie. The chapter concludes with a section in which the two-factor model of egotism is examined in terms of theoretical perspectives provided by control motivation, dissonance and balance theories, and the theory of objective self-awareness.

In the final chapter of this section, “Attributional Styles,” William Ickes and Mary Anne Layden offer additional evidence implicating personal dispositions in the attribution process. Their research, when considered in the context of the many other studies they review, indicates that individuals exhibit characteristic styles of attributional preference that appear to be integrally related to such core aspects of the self-concept as sex and level of self-esteem. In general, masculinity and high self-esteem are associated with the internal ascription of positive or “success” outcomes and the external ascription of negative or “failure” outcomes. By contrast, femininity and low self-esteem are associated with a relatively greater externalization of success and internalization of failure. The results of the authors’ studies suggest not only that attributional style has often been con-founded with sex and self-esteem in previous investigations of attribution and performance; they also suggest that the unconfounding of these factors in an experimentally induced failure situation reveals strong and additive performance deficits that are associated with sex and attributional style but are unrelated to level of self-esteem per se. Moreover, attributional style and self-esteem appear to be dynamically related such that directional changes in one variable are associated with corresponding changes in the other. The authors discuss the possible relevance of these findings to current theory and research in the area of human depression and learned helplessness.

1	Is It Real?

Philip Brickman

Northwestern University

Think it over what you just said.
Think it over in your pretty little head.
Are you sure that I’m not the one?
Is your love real or just for fun?

– From the Buddy Holly song,
“Think It Over.”

How do people decide whether something is real or not? The question is a venerable one in psychology, the subject of one of William James’s most famous papers (1869). It is also an important one. Our sense that a person can correctly decide what is real and what is not may be the most important element in our judgment of them. Attributing reality to things that are not real, or denying reality to things that are real, is taken as the most serious sign of mental illness. Undermining a person’s sense of both physical and social reality is a standard element of modern torture. Defying other people’s sense of reality, in reporting UFOs or contradicting their apparent perception of the lengths of lines, requires a definite degree of courage.

A decade of research in social psychology has focused on how people make attributions about almost everything (Harvey, Ickes, & Kidd, 1976) – but not how they judge whether or not something is real. Attribution research probably assumes that people are making judgments only about things they think are real and passes over the question of the initial attribution of reality. Perhaps social psychologists feel that questions of reality refer first to physical reality and as such are more appropriate for physicists and philosophers. Perhaps they feel that questions of social reality are too vague for precise research and are thus best left for sociologists whose analyses may be brilliant but whose taste in research is different (Berger & Luckmann, 1966; Goffman, 1974).

It is the purpose of this paper to show, on the contrary, that questions about what is real are already central to social psychology; second, that it is possible to develop a series of researchable propositions on the attribution of reality; and finally, that by focusing explicit attention on this topic we can improve our understanding of validity in social research and our ability to do research that is responsive to human concerns. First we turn to a consideration of how reasonable mistakes that people make in attributing reality are already central to method and theory in social psychology.

ERRORS IN ATTRIBUTING REALITY

We are always fascinated when people are made to treat as real things that they know are not, as with hypnosis, sensory deprivation, optical illusions, and magic. These involve, at their most dramatic, alterations in the appearance of physical reality. The equivalent for social reality are cases in which people come to treat as real a role or a relationship that they know is not real. The center of the psychoanalytic relationship is the patient’s endowing the analyst with feelings and powers that the analyst does not in fact possess but that belonged to another figure in the patient’s life, a process called transference. Perhaps the most famous example in social psychology of something initially unreal becoming real is the Zimbardo, Haney, and Banks (1973) prison experiment, in which the guards, the prisoners, and even the experimenters found themselves caught up in the situation far more than they had expected. Note that saying the Zimbardo experiment became real in this sense is not saying that the experiment was a true or precise simulation of a prison, a point on which the experimenters themselves are not always clear. The experiment was a prison for those imprisoned in it, but of a sort that may or may not have corresponded to those that exist outside.

Theater provides perhaps the most common instance of our capacity to treat as real events that we know are not. Indeed, we require that actors in a movie or play appear to be caught up in their roles. In addition, however, I think we have an extra degree of fascination with movies in which the actors’ roles become blurred with or extensions of their own lives. Actors may give their best performances under these circumstances. Examples include Frank Sinatra in From Here to Eternity, Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, Warren Beatty in Shampoo, Sylvester Stallone in Rocky, and any number of Bogart, Hepburn, and Garbo films. Incidentally, it may be helpful to note what keeps actors from being overwhelmed by their roles in the way the much less talented players in the Zimbardo production were. Actors are continually interrupted between scenes and performances by reminders that what they are doing is not real, whereas the Zimbardo experiment ran continuously 24 hours a day. Dramas that come closest to continuity are the soap operas, in which actors play the same role day after day for years. These productions are notoriously difficult for both viewers and actors to keep separate from reality.

Through dissonance theory (Wicklund & Brehm, 1976) and self-perception theory (Bern, 1972), social psychology also provides examples of our capacity to treat as real events we initially felt were not. The central drama with which these theories are concerned is a situation in which a person is asked to say some-think he or she does not believe. Under specifiable circumstances, people making these statements are likely to give some credence to what they initially thought was false. In particular, if people do not have good ext...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• PART I ATTRIBUTION AT THE PERSONAL LEVEL
• PART II ATTRIBUTION AT THE INTERPERSONAL LEVEL
• PART III THEORETICAL INTEGRATION
• PART IV CURRENT PROBLEMS AND FUTURE PERSPECTIVES
• Author Index
• Subject Index