Attributional Judgments Research Articles

Self-(Re)Presentations in the EFL Classroom

To self-present in the EFL classroom is a key productive skill for an EFL learner whether beginner or advanced. To self-represent is an empowerment option for the student who would rather ward off arbitrary identity attribution judgements. Given the critical role played by the EFL classroom as host to a complicated network of cultural backgrounds, identity acknowledgment does not have to be solely commensurate with curriculum-related obligation disclosures in an ELT context. The following ethnography in TEFL was conducted at a Greek High School in a town of a border island with the object of observing how languaculture interferes with peer interaction. The EFL teacher-inquirer via walk-through observation monitored how students negotiated their linguistic profile in conformance with Trompenaars’ five-dimension cultural framework. The outcomes show that interactants created what they perceived as a “third space” where a choir of voices laid the foundations for the rapprochement of different cultures.

Understanding Quality of Pinot Noir Wine: Can Modelling and Machine Learning Pave the Way?

Wine research has as its core components the disciplines of sensory analysis, viticulture, and oenology. Wine quality is an important concept for each of these disciplines, as well as for both wine producers and consumers. Any technique that could help producers to understand the nature of wine quality and how consumers perceive it, will help them to design even more effective marketing strategies. However, predicting a wine’s quality presents wine science modelling with a real challenge. We used sample data from Pinot noir wines from different regions of New Zealand to develop a mathematical model that can predict wine quality, and applied dimensional analysis with the Buckingham Pi theorem to determine the mathematical relationship among different chemical and physiochemical compounds. This mathematical model used perceived wine quality indices investigated by wine experts and industry professionals. Afterwards, machine learning algorithms are applied to validate the relevant sensory and chemical concepts. Judgments of wine intrinsic attributes, including overall quality, were made by wine professionals to two sets of 18 Pinot noir wines from New Zealand. This study develops a conceptual and mathematical framework to predict wine quality, and then validated these using a large dataset with machine learning approaches. It is worth noting that the predicted wine quality indices are in good agreement with the wine experts’ perceived quality ratings.

Caught in the ACTS: Defining Abstract Cognitive Task Sequences as an Independent Process.

Cognitive neuroscience currently conflates the study of serial responses (e.g., delay match to sample/nonsample, n-back) with the study of sequential operations. In this essay, our goal is to define and disentangle the latter, termed abstract cognitive task sequences (ACTS). Existing literatures address tasks requiring serial events, including procedural learning of implicit motor responses, statistical learning of predictive relationships, and judgments of attributes. These findings do not describe the behavior and underlying mechanism required to succeed at remembering to evaluate color, then shape; or to multiply, then add. A new literature is needed to characterize these sorts of second-order cognitive demands of studying a sequence of operations. Our second goal is to characterize gaps in knowledge related to ACTS that merit further investigation. In the following sections, we define more precisely what we mean by ACTS and suggest research questions that further investigation would be positioned to address.

Children's Navigation of Contextual Cues in Peer Transgressions: The Role of Aggression Form, Transgressor Gender, and Transgressor Intention.

When faced with transgressions in their peer groups, children must navigate a series of situational cues (e.g., type of transgression, transgressor gender, transgressor intentionality) to evaluate the moral status of transgressions and to inform their subsequent behavior toward the transgressors. There is little research on which cues children prioritize when presented together, how reliance on these cues may be affected by certain biases (e.g., gender norms), or how the prioritization of these cues may change with age. To explore these questions, 138 5- to 7-year-olds (younger children) and 8- to 10-year-olds (older children) evaluated a series of boy and girl characters who partook in physical or relational aggression with ambiguous or purposeful intent. Children were asked to provide sociomoral evaluations (i.e., acceptability, punishment, and intention attribution judgments) and social preferences. Transgressor gender only impacted children’s social preferences. Conversely, aggression form and transgressor intent shifted children’s sociomoral judgments: they were harsher toward physical transgressors with purposeful intent over those with ambiguous intent but made similar evaluations for relational transgressors regardless of intentionality. The present results suggest that gender is perhaps not uniformly relevant to children across all contexts, as other cues were prioritized for children’s sociomoral judgments. Since children likely have less familiarity with relational aggression compared to physical aggression, it follows that intent would only shift judgments about physical transgressors. This research provides insight about how children simultaneously navigate multiple cues in aggression contexts, which is likely reflective of their real-world experiences.

Demons with guns: How belief in pure evil relates to Attributional judgments for gun violence perpetrators

SummaryPeople who report greater belief in pure evil (BPE; the tendency to attribute harmdoing to dispositionally sadistic perpetrators) generally punish criminal perpetrators more regardless of mitigating circumstances (e.g., having a brain tumor). What attributional/cognitive processes underlie such punishment? A national sample (final N = 302) read an alleged USA Today article about a mall shooting. We manipulated whether the shooter exhibited a brain tumor and whether the shooter exhibited stereotypically evil traits. Regardless of experimental conditions, individuals who reported greater BPE perceived the shooter's behavior as more internal, intentional, controllable, and blameworthy. These attributional judgments also helped mediate the relationship between BPE and punishment. Ancillary measures demonstrated other potential cognitive biases (overprecision and confirmation bias) in processing information about the shooter/shooting. In sum, people who report greater BPE held the shooter more liable for his actions despite mitigating evidence, and such attributions helped explain the link between BPE and punishment.

Stigma association type and sponsor corporate image: Exploring the negative off-field behaviour of sportspeople

This paper examines how consumers’ exposure to news-media reports of an athlete's negative off-field behaviour influences perceptions of a sporting team's sponsor. Stigma-by-association is proposed as an explanatory theory for the manner in which this process occurs. Two experiments were conducted on samples of both students and adults. Results indicate that off-field behaviour of athletes has no influence on consumer perceptions of sponsor corporate image under conditions of simple association. In contrast, significant changes in sponsor corporate image are found under meaningful association conditions. The results provide an understanding of how consumers make differential attribution judgments of associated entities dependent on the context of off-field behaviour. The research highlights implications for sponsors seeking to maximise the effectiveness of their sponsorship objectives.

Real-Time 3D Reconstruction of Thin Surface Based on Laser Line Scanner.

The truncated signed distance field (TSDF) has been applied as a fast, accurate, and flexible geometric fusion method in 3D reconstruction of industrial products based on a hand-held laser line scanner. However, this method has some problems for the surface reconstruction of thin products. The surface mesh will collapse to the interior of the model, resulting in some topological errors, such as overlap, intersections, or gaps. Meanwhile, the existing TSDF method ensures real-time performance through significant graphics processing unit (GPU) memory usage, which limits the scale of reconstruction scene. In this work, we propose three improvements to the existing TSDF methods, including: (i) a thin surface attribution judgment method in real-time processing that solves the problem of interference between the opposite sides of the thin surface; we distinguish measurements originating from different parts of a thin surface by the angle between the surface normal and the observation line of sight; (ii) a post-processing method to automatically detect and repair the topological errors in some areas where misjudgment of thin-surface attribution may occur; (iii) a framework that integrates the central processing unit (CPU) and GPU resources to implement our 3D reconstruction approach, which ensures real-time performance and reduces GPU memory usage. The proposed results show that this method can provide more accurate 3D reconstruction of a thin surface, which is similar to the state-of-the-art laser line scanners with 0.02 mm accuracy. In terms of performance, the algorithm can guarantee a frame rate of more than 60 frames per second (FPS) with the GPU memory footprint under 500 MB. In total, the proposed method can achieve a real-time and high-precision 3D reconstruction of a thin surface.

Can You Have It Both Ways? Plausible Deniability and Attribution in Anonymous Coercive Bargaining

States and nonstate actors often conduct unclaimed coercive attacks. Regarding these attacks, commentators and scholars commonly observe that targets know the identity of the perpetrator, which allows the coercive message to go through, and that anonymity grants perpetrators plausible deniability, shielding them from retaliation by targets and third parties. The literature has neglected the puzzle of actors reaching diverging assessments about the identity of the perpetrator of anonymous attacks while having the same information. We address the puzzle by theorizing that targets of unclaimed attacks and third parties may reach different attribution judgments due to distinct emotional reactions: targets are more likely to feel angry, which induces a sense of certainty and a desire to blame someone, prompting confident attribution to a plausible culprit despite objective evidentiary gaps. We test our argument with a vignette experiment describing a fictional attack, randomizing whether the attack was claimed by a terrorist organization or remained unclaimed, and whether the respondents’ country or some other country was targeted. The analysis confirms that anonymity suppresses confident attribution for subjects from another country but not for those from the target; anger mediates the tendency for subjects from the target country to confidently attribute anonymous attacks more frequently.

How user-generated judgments of hotel attributes indicate guest satisfaction

ABSTRACTUser-generated content is a major source of information particularly in tourism industry where consumers seek unbiased and unregulated information. While making their hotel booking decisions, consumers refer to the previous guests’ experiences expressed in the hotel reviews across social media. Studies in the literature have focused on enhancing the understanding of what makes customers satisfied or dissatisfied. They have analyzed the text reviews and the patterns in the overall rating and ranking of the hotels given by hotel guests. While most emerging destinations have been studied in the literature, studies related to India, a fast-growing leisure destination are scant. The present study tries to understand the hotel attributes that contribute towards customer satisfaction or dissatisfaction using online reviews for all hotels of Andaman & Nicobar Islands in India. Among the eight attributes identified from the most frequently used words in the text reviews, the study finds that while the location has a significant probability of increasing the ratings of both high- and low-rated reviews, rooms seem to have the most significant impact on lowering the probability of high scores irrespective of positive or negative sentiment review. The study also finds that guests of luxury hotels rate the hotels significantly higher than the guests of midrange and budget hotels.

Sense of agency is modulated by interactions between action choice, outcome valence, and predictability

Sense of agency is a feeling of control over one’s actions to cause sensory events in one’s environment. While previous studies investigated the role of action choice and emotional valence of action outcome in forming implicit agency, the results were not consistent and the relationship between these factors remains unclear. We manipulated both action alternatives available and emotional valences of sounds (either positive or negative) as action outcomes and measured the resultant intentional binding effects in two experiments that differed in predictability of outcome valence. When participants could not predict the valence of action outcomes, they showed stronger sense of agency for negative outcomes determined by their free choice (Experiment 1). Conversely, when participants’ actions caused only outcomes with specific valence, this interaction was not observed (Experiment 2). These findings imply that the implicit processes of agency reflect an integrative context-dependent cognition of consequence of action choice, prior to explicit attribution judgments.

Stigma and Legitimacy: Two Ends of a Single Continuum or Different Continua Altogether?

Hampel and Tracey and Helms, Patterson, and Hudson offer contrasting perspectives regarding whether stigma and legitimacy belong on a single continuum or different continua altogether. To clarify the high stakes involved when society stigmatizes actors, I argue that all stigmas have moral overtones and that, while stigmatization upholds systems of values, norms and ideologies, the moralizing often comes with a significant price not only for the stigmatized but for society itself. I then argue that the contrasting perspectives can be reconciled if scholars restrict the definitions of both stigma and legitimacy to group-specific judgments of specific practices or attributes. However, I ponder if the definitional precision gained by collapsing both stigma and legitimacy to the same narrow focus costs us, as scholars, more than it benefits. I close with two cautionary notes. First, scholars should avoid being seduced by society’s crass demand for simplistic labels when it comes to moral fitness and thinking that stigma and legitimacy are inherently binary states (black vs. white) rather than the continuous states (shades of gray) they usually are. Second, scholars should be wary of viewing the midpoint of a stigma or legitimacy scale as representing indifference or neutrality when it may actually represent ambivalence – a far different phenomenological experience. Rather than assessing stigma/legitimacy with a single scale that varies from positive/high to negative/low – with indifferent or neutral as the midpoint – scholars should consider assessing them with dual scales for legitimacy and illegitimacy or stigmatized and non-stigmatized.

Neural representations of the multidimensional self in the cortical midline structures

Self-concept consists of self-identity that distinguishes self from other people and knowledge that describes one's own attributes in different dimensions. Because self-concept plays a fundamental role in individuals' social functioning and mental health, behavioral studies have examined cognitive processes of self-identity and self-knowledge extensively. Nevertheless, how different dimensions of the self-concept are organized in multi-voxel neural patterns remains elusive. Here, we address this issue by employing representational similarity analyses of behavioral/theoretical models of multidimensional self-representation and blood oxygen level dependent responses, recorded using functional MRI, to judgments of personality traits, physical attributes and social roles of oneself, a close (one's mother) other, and a distant (celebrity) other. The multivoxel patterns of neural activities in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) and posterior cingulate cortex (PCC) distinguished representations of the self from both close and distant others, suggesting a specific neural representation of the self-identity; and distinguished different dimensions of person knowledge of oneself, indicating dimension-sensitive neural representation of the self. Moreover, the pattern of PCC activity is more strongly coupled with dimensions of self-knowledge than self-identity. Our findings suggest that multivoxel neural patterns of the cortical midline structures distinguish not only self from others but also discriminate different dimensions of the self.

Evaluation of Artificial Mouths in Social Robots

The external aspects of a robot affect how people behave and perceive it while interacting. In this paper, we study the importance of the mouth displayed by a social robot and explore how different designs of an artificial LED-based mouths alter the participants’ judgments of a robot's attributes and their attention to the robot's message. We evaluated participants’ judgments of a speaking robot under four conditions: 1) without a mouth; 2) with a static smile; 3) with a vibrating, wave-shaped mouth; and 4) with a moving, human-like mouth. A total of 79 participants evaluated their perceptions of an on-video robot showing one of the four conditions. The results show that the presence of a mouth, as well as its design, alters the perception of the robot. In particular, the presence of a mouth makes the robot to be perceived more lifelike and less sad. The human-like mouth was the one participants liked the most and, along with the smile, they were the friendliest ones. On the contrary, participants rated the mouthless robot and the one with the wave-like mouth as the most dangerous ones.

Examining consumers' responses to corporate social responsibility addressing childhood obesity: The mediating role of attributional judgments

Food marketers have responded with numerous self-regulatory actions intended to address childhood obesity. While research on corporate social responsibility (CSR) generally provides strong evidence with regard to the economic benefits enjoyed by socially responsible corporations, it is unclear how and why consumers respond to different levels of CSR, especially in the food industry. Our research examines the effects of CSR activities, intended to combat childhood obesity, on consumers' company evaluations and subsequent purchase intentions, while assessing the mediating role of attributions, in a product-failure setting. Results indicate that a food company's high commitment toward a major social issue may trigger less blame to the food marketer for a product failure, which in turn positively affects consumers' attitudes toward the company. Our findings offer strong evidence that food corporations can truly do well by doing good.

The perceptual dimensions of natural dynamic flow.

We measured perceptual judgments of category, material attributes, affordances, and similarity to investigate the perceptual dimensions underlying the visual representation of a broad class of natural dynamic flows (sea waves, smoke, and windblown foliage). The dynamic flows were looped 3-s movies windowed with circular apertures of two sizes to manipulate the level of spatial context. In low levels of spatial context (smaller apertures), human observers' judgments of material attributes and affordances were inaccurate, with estimates biased toward assumptions that the flows resulted from objects that were rigid, "pick-up-able," and not penetrable. The similarity arrangements showed dynamic flow clusters based partly on material, but dominated by color appearance. In high levels of spatial context (large apertures), observers reliably estimated material categories and their attributes. The similarity arrangements were based primarily on categories related to external, physical causes. Representational similarity analysis suggests that while shallow dimensions like color sometimes account for inferences of physical causes in the low-context condition, shallow dimensions cannot fully account for these inferences in the high-context condition. For the current broad data set of dynamic flows, the perceptual dimensions that best account for the similarity arrangements in the high-context condition are related to the intermolecular bond strength of a material's underlying physical structure. These arrangements are also best related to affordances that underlie common motor activities. Thus, the visual system appears to use an efficient strategy to resolve flow ambiguity; vision will sometimes rely on local, image-based, statistical properties that can support reliable inference of external physical causes, and other times it uses deeper causal knowledge to interpret and use flow information to the extent that it is useful for everyday action decisions.

Introducing Emotioncy as an Invisible Force Controlling Causal Decisions: A Case of Attribution Theory

Abstract Given the prominence of studies aimed at determining the factors influencing causal judgments, this study attempts to introduce the newly-developed concept of emotioncy as one of the guiding factors pushing attribution judgments toward a certain spectrum. To this end, two scales of attribution and emotioncy were designed using ten hypothetical situations. A total number of 309 participants filled out the scales. The construct validity of the scales was substantiated through confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). Afterwards, structural equation modeling (SEM) was utilized to examine the possible relationships among the sub-constructs of attribution and emotioncy scales. The results indicated that as the participants’ emotioncy level increases, it becomes more likely for them to attribute probable causes to external factors. Moreover, it was revealed that while the involved individuals attribute causes to external factors, the exvolved ones attribute them to internal factors. In the end, implications of the findings were discussed in the realm of judgment and decision making.

Effects of Facial Symmetry and Gaze Direction on Perception of Social Attributes: A Study in Experimental Art History.

This article explores the possibility of testing hypotheses about art production in the past by collecting data in the present. We call this enterprise “experimental art history”. Why did medieval artists prefer to paint Christ with his face directed towards the beholder, while profane faces were noticeably more often painted in different degrees of profile? Is a preference for frontal faces motivated by deeper evolutionary and biological considerations? Head and gaze direction is a significant factor for detecting the intentions of others, and accurate detection of gaze direction depends on strong contrast between a dark iris and a bright sclera, a combination that is only found in humans among the primates. One uniquely human capacity is language acquisition, where the detection of shared or joint attention, for example through detection of gaze direction, contributes significantly to the ease of acquisition. The perceived face and gaze direction is also related to fundamental emotional reactions such as fear, aggression, empathy and sympathy. The fast-track modulator model presents a related fast and unconscious subcortical route that involves many central brain areas. Activity in this pathway mediates the affective valence of the stimulus. In particular, different sub-regions of the amygdala show specific activation as response to gaze direction, head orientation and the valence of facial expression. We present three experiments on the effects of face orientation and gaze direction on the judgments of social attributes. We observed that frontal faces with direct gaze were more highly associated with positive adjectives. Does this help to associate positive values to the Holy Face in a Western context? The formal result indicates that the Holy Face is perceived more positively than profiles with both direct and averted gaze. Two control studies, using a Brazilian and a Dutch database of photographs, showed a similar but weaker effect with a larger contrast between the gaze directions for profiles. Our findings indicate that many factors affect the impression of a face, and that eye contact in combination with face direction reinforce the general impression of portraits, rather than determine it.

Juror decision making in not criminally responsible on account of mental disorder trials: Effects of defendant gender and mental illness type

This study sought to examine the potential impact of defendant gender and mental illness type on Canadian juror decision making by manipulating the gender (man, woman) and mental illness (substance abuse disorder, schizophrenia, bipolar, depression) of the defendant in a second-degree murder case involving an insanity plea. Participants read a trial transcript that included definitions of second-degree murder and the not criminally on account of mental disorder (NCRMD) defense. Participants then provided a verdict (guilty or NCRMD) and completed various scales measuring attributional judgments, perceptions of the defendant, and perceived dangerousness. Contrary to expectations, NCRMD was chosen over a guilty verdict in the majority of cases. Findings also indicated that participant decisions and perceptions regarding defendants diagnosed with substance abuse disorder differed from the other mental illness groups. The gender of the defendant had an influence on participants' perceptions of internal attributions, and the perceived stability of criminal behaviors. Results suggest that perceptions of mental illness influence verdicts in NCRMD cases, and that defendant gender plays a role in participants' perceptions of defendants. These findings contribute to the scarce literature on mental illness in the Canadian court system. Future research should examine the interaction between juror gender, defendant gender, and mental illness in insanity cases.

The Impact of Sustainability on Consumer Preference Judgments of Product Attributes

Despite significant interest from consumers, sustainable products often struggle to find success in the marketplace. This failure is frequently attributed to the perception that consumers remain unwilling to sacrifice product attributes such as form, function, or price in order to adopt a product whose environmental impact is less than that of a competing product. This work aims to better understand how knowing a product's environmental impact affects preference for that product's disparate attributes. Three products of various monetary investments and numbers of relevant features were explored through a conjoint analysis experiment that uncovers consumer preference for discrete form, function, and price attributes. In this work, single use spoons, reusable water bottles, and home washing machines were used for analysis. These three products were decomposed into form, function, and price attributes that were varied in discrete levels. After a form-only ratings-based conjoint analysis study was conducted to find high, medium, and low preference form designs for each participant, two separate form–function–price discrete choice studies were conducted for each of the three products. These two discrete choice trials were identical in all aspects except in the second trial participants were provided with calculated environmental impact values for all design configurations; the presented environmental impact information was a dependent variable based on a life cycle analysis calculation using the current product configuration being shown to the participant. Further, adding this information raises the decision to one of a social or moral choice. Results show that when participants are provided with this additional piece of information, their preference for form, function, and price attributes of a product is greatly impacted. In particular, we find that for the products chosen here, the importance of functional attributes increases in the context of environmental impact metrics, while the importance of form decreases and the importance of price decreases modestly. In other words, placing the preference judgment within a social or moral choice context changes decisions about product preferences.

Impact of metal and ceramic fixed orthodontic appliances on judgments of beauty and other face-related attributes

Physical attributes, behavior, and personal ornaments exert a direct influence on how a person's beauty and personality are judged. The aim of this study was to investigate how people who wear a fixed orthodontic appliance see themselves and are seen by others in social settings. A total of 60 adults evaluated their own smiling faces in 3 different scenarios: without a fixed orthodontic appliance, wearing a metal fixed orthodontic appliance, and wearing an esthetic fixed orthodontic appliance. Furthermore, 15 adult raters randomly assessed the same faces in standardized front-view facial photographs. Both the subjects and the raters answered a questionnaire in which they evaluated criteria on a numbered scale ranging from 0 to 10. The models judged their own beauty, and the raters assigned scores to beauty, age, intelligence, ridiculousness, extroversion, and success. The self-evaluations showed decreased beauty scores (P <0.0001) when a fixed orthodontic appliance, especially a metal one, was being worn. There was no statistically significant difference between the 3 situations in the 6 criteria analyzed. A fixed orthodontic appliance did not affect how personal attributes are assessed. However, fixed orthodontic appliances apparently changed the subjects' self-perceptions when they looked in the mirror.