Do People Use Consensus Information in Making Causal Attributions?
نویسندگان
چکیده
Nisbett and Borgida's failure to obtain effects for consensus information on person versus situation attributions was questioned regarding their operationalization of consensus. Nisbett and Borgida's finding was replicated, but an operationalization of consensus designed to reflect Kelley's conceptual criterion of perceived covariation and to represent more levels of consensus resulted in significant consensus effects on person versus situation attributions In Study 2, consensus information was found to affect specific traits judged to be relevant to the given behavior. In addition, the second study found significant effects for consensus information on the subjects' predictions of target persons' behavior. Included were discussions of (a) issues regarding operationalization of the consensus variable, (b) issues regarding operationalization of dependent variables in consensus research, and (c) the relationship between consensus research in the area of attribution and base-rate research in the area of the psychology of prediction (Kahneman & Tversky).
منابع مشابه
Naive Attributors' Attributions and Predictions: What Is Informative and When Is an Effect an Effect?
Borgida has questioned the extent to which Wells and Harvey's data indicate that people do not ignore consensus information when making predictions and attributions. This article takes issue with Borgida's summary of parts of our work and with several of his arguments on grounds of precision and completeness. It is also noted that Kahneman and Tversky's analyses of data in their lawyer-engineer...
متن کاملTwo types of typicality: rethinking the role of statistical typicality in ordinary causal attributions.
Recent work on the role of norms in the use of causal language by ordinary people has led to a consensus among several researchers: The consensus position is that causal attributions are sensitive to both statistical norms and prescriptive norms. But what is a statistical norm? We argue that there are at least two types that should be distinguished--agent-level statistical norms and population-...
متن کاملThe double-edged sword of genetic accounts of criminality: causal attributions from genetic ascriptions affect legal decision making.
Much debate exists surrounding the applicability of genetic information in the courtroom, making the psychological processes underlying how people consider this information important to explore. This article addresses how people think about different kinds of causal explanations in legal decision-making contexts. Three studies involving a total of 600 Mechanical Turk and university participants...
متن کاملHelp-Seeking and Causal Attributions for Helping
Olsson, I. I. 2002. Help-seeking and Causal Attributions for Helping. Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis. Comprehensive Summaries of Uppsala Dissertations from the Faculty of Social Sciences 112. 93 pp. Uppsala. ISBN 91554-5229-9. This thesis investigates help-seeking and effects of help-seeking on causal attributions for helping (i.e., what people believe caused help or lack of help). Additionally...
متن کاملAcquisition of dispositional attributions: effects of sample size and covariation
Two experiments examined whether dispositional attributions are sensitive to the sample size of the evidence indicating a given level of covariation between person and behavior. Participants were given high or low levels of covariation (i.e. consensus and distinctiveness), and the acquisition of dispositional attributions was monitored by requesting dispositional trait ratings at fixed interval...
متن کامل