The Effects of Behavioral, Situational, and Person Information on Different Attribution Judgments

Abstract

Two experiments that test several issues in the attribution literature were performed. In Experiment 1, subjects were told that a target person had performed a particular behavior and were also given information about the personality of the person and whether situational forces encouraged the behavior. Behaviors were related either to partially restrictive schemata or hierarchically restrictive schemata (See Reeder & Brewer, 1979). Trait attributions generally showed that behavior, person, and situation information all had effects but that the effects of behavior were greater, and the effects of situation and person information less, for the hierarchically restrictive traits. Subjects were also asked for traditional internal and external causality judgments. In general, judgments of internal causality were more responsive to person information and judgments of external causality more responsive to situational information suggesting that previous demonstrations of perceivers′ tendencies to underutilize situational information may be due, in part, to the ways attributions have been measured. In Experiment 2, subjects made trait attributions, but also explained the reasons behind them. These open-ended responses suggest that there are different reasoning processes underlying the use of the two types of schemata.