Self-affirmation theory proposes that people can respond to threats to the self by affirming alternative sources of self-integrity, resulting in greater openness to self-threatening information. The present research examines this at a group level by investigating whether a group affirmation (affirming an important group value) increases acceptance of threatening group information among sports t...

Explanatory style models of optimism focus on three aspects of attributions for the causes of positive and negative events: stability, pervasiveness, and internal–external control. These three aspects are predicted to cluster within each valence forming explanatory-style factors and these in turn are predicted to correlate negatively, in line with attributional accounts of depression. Here we r...

BACKGROUND Maladaptive cognitive biases such as negative attributional style and hopelessness have been implicated in the development and maintenance of depression. According to the hopelessness theory of depression, hopelessness mediates the association between attributional style and depression. The aetiological processes underpinning this influential theory remain unknown. The current study ...

Stereotype-confirming biases are well documented in the social psychological literature. However, motivations to disconfirm social stereotypes may be more influential for unprejudiced individuals. Three experiments are presented that test the hypothesis that extremely unprejudiced people exhibit a bias toward stereotype disconfirmation. Experiment 1 investigates stereotype disconfirmation in in...

This article examined the impact of relationship closeness on the self-serving bias (SSB). Members of relationally distant dyads working on interdependent-outcomes tasks manifested the SSB: They took credit for dyadic success but blamed the partner for dyadic failure. However, members of relationally close dyads did not manifest the SSB: They did not take more credit than their partner for dyad...

Attributional calculus is a typed logic system that combines elements of propositional logic, predicate logic, and multiple valued logic. It was developed with the main intention to support natural induction, by which we mean an inductive inference that generates knowledge in the forms “natural” to people, such as natural language style descriptions or graphical visualizations, and by that simp...