ATTRIBUTIONS AND INFORMATION PROCESSING TIME AS A FUNCTION OF SUBJECT INVOLVEMENT AND TEST OUTCOME (SOCIAL COGNITION, MEMORY, PERCEPTION)

Attribution theory postulates that human actors and observers process information differently and make different causal judgments about observed behaviors and events. Generally, an actor tends to attribute success internally to his own ability and/or effort, whereas he attributes failure externally to bad luck and/or difficulty of the task. Observers, however, are inclined to see the actor's success as externally determined and his failure as internally determined. Two experiments were designed to show how an observer's personal involvement directly influences his attributions of an actor's test score. It was hypothesized that the magnitude of this effect would depend on the extent of the observer's involvement in the task attempted by the actor. Involvement, in this instance, was manipulated by instructing the observer that he would shortly be assigned the same task. Previous studies have investigated observers' use of information by providing them with personally unimportant (uninvolving) descriptions of an event and the consensus, consistency, and distinctive information combinations (McArthur, 1972). In their daily lives, however, people seldom have access to these summaries of consensus, consistency, and distinctiveness. People frequently use attributed causality for inferences about behavior. These inferences concern that the extent to which an actor's behavior toward a given stimulus in a given set of circumstances will generalize to persons other than the actor (and thus will have high "consensus"), to other stimuli (and thus be low in "distinctiveness"), and to other circumstances (and thus be high in "consistency"). The study, thus, investigated how causal attribution affects generalizability estimates. The results may shed some light on the biases affecting these estimates. In addition, the present study included measures of the information processing-time taken to make causal judgments about an event. The results showed that the time subjects took to (a) read/comprehend and (b) respond to attributional questions corresponded to the type of causal attributions they made as well as the degree of their involvement as observers. These measures suggested that information processing is not the same in actors and observers. The implications of the results in explaining actors' and observers' attributional differences are discussed.