Motivational Biases Research Articles

Motivational biases in the attribution of responsibility for an accident: A meta-analysis of the defensive-attribution hypothesis.

Motivational biases in the attribution of responsibility for an accident: A meta-analysis of the defensive-attribution hypothesis.

Motivational biases in the attribution of responsibility for an accident: A meta-analysis of the defensive-attribution hypothesis.

Wake Forest University Research concerned with motivational distortion in the attribution of responsibility for an accident is reviewed. The results of a statistical combination of 22 relevant studies suggest a statistically significant but weak tendency to attribute more responsibility to an accident perpetrator for a severe than for a mild accident. An examination of interacting variables found, consistent with Shaver's defensive-attribution hypothesis, that when observers were personally and situationally similar to the accident perpetrator, they tended to attribute less responsibility to the perpetrator when accident severity increased. The opposite was found to be the case when the perceiver and the perpetrator were dissimilar. Experiments using stronger subject-involving manipulations also appeared more likely to produce evidence in support of the defensive-attribution hypothesis than did experiments with low-involvernent manipulations. The relationship between this model and other theoretical and conceptual approaches is discussed, and recommendations for future research are suggested. It is concluded that research strongly supports the defensive-attribution hypothesis when the similarity variables are considered, and that this effect represents one example of how perceivers' self-protective motives influence responsibility attributions.

Motivational biases in causal attributions of arousal.

Snyder's attribute-ambiguity theory proposes that people sometimes seek ambiguity rather than clarity as to their behavior and the motives behind it. They do this to avoid learning something about themselves that they may not wish to i know, in other words, because of ego-defensiveness. Consistent with this reasoning, in the current research it was hypothesized that the desire to seek ambiguity as to the cause of a particular state of arousal will increase if either that arousal state or its source is potentially threatening to self-esteem. To test this hypothesis, two studies were run. In the first experiment, high- and low-sex-guilt male subjects were shown either an arousing erotic movie or a nonarousing movie; in the second experiment high- and low-guilt females were led to believe that they were very aroused by pictures of nude men. Ambiguity was introduced into both situations by means of a bogus, nonthreatening, alternative arousal source (a placebo). Results indicated that high-guilt subjects were actively involved in the process of determining which source was arousing them. More importantly, this involvement appeared to be motivated by ego-defensiveness. In both experiments, when high-guilt subjects were confronted by an erotic stimulus, they chose to attribute arousal to the bogus source—and thus create ambiguity as to the actual cause and nature of their arousal—more than did the low-guilt subjects.

Motivational biases in causal attributions of arousal.

Motivational biases in causal attributions of arousal.

The role of ability and effort in attributions for sport achievement1

In an initial attempt to assess the applicability of Weiner's (1972) attribution model to sport-related behavior, the effects of ability (high versus low), effort (high versus low) and outcome (success versus failure) on causal attributions were investigated. After riding a bicycle ergometer, subjects were asked to attribute the cause of their increased or decreased performance to ability, effort, task difficulty and/or luck. The results indicated that successful outcomes were attributed to both ability and effort and that unsuccessful outcomes were attributed to a lack of ability but not a lack of effort. While the task was seen as easier following success, the perception of low effort mediated this relationship. The results were interpreted to support a situationally specific conceptualization of sport achievement. First, whereas a motivational bias appears to preclude low ability attributions in intellectual pursuits, such is not the case with a novel physical task contingent on strength and muscular endurance. It was suggested that physiologically related ability may be viewed as relatively unstable. Second, relative to intellectual tasks, sport-related effort may be more salient and more quantifiable and may exert a greater influence on subsequent attributions for sport achievement. Finally, support was obtained for the assertions that affect is codetermined by both effort and ability and that expectancy discrepant performance is accounted for largely by perceptions of task difficulty.

Whites' ethnocentrism and their attributions for the behavior of blacks: A motivational bias1

AbstractPrevious research has shown that people make more derogatory attributions for the behavior of outgroup members than for the behavior of ingroup members. However, these results may be due merely to a cultural stereotype of the outgroup rather than to ethnocentrism (which would entail dislike for members of the outgroup). To examine the effect of ethnocentrism on attributions, irrespective of the cultural stereotype, and to examine whether people who differ in ethnocentrism also differ in their attributions for whites and blacks, high and low ethnocentric whites made attributions for the success and failure of black and white actors on a task which required an ability that was outside the scope of the cultural stereotype of blacks, i.e., ESP ability. Examination of these attributions revealed that the more ethnocentric the subjects were, the more they tended to give whites greater credit for success than blacks, and the more they tended to give whites less blame for failure than blacks. These results were discussed in terms of their implications for the persistence of prejudice and for the effects of motivations on attributions for the behavior of others.

Attribution of success and failure revisited, or: The motivational bias is alive and well in attribution theory

AbstractDo causal attributions serve the need to protect and / or enhance self‐esteem? In a recent review, Miller and Ross (1975) proposed that there is evidence for self‐serving effect in the attribution of success but not in the attribution of failure; and that this effect reflects biases in information‐processing rather than self‐esteem maintenance. The present review indicated that self‐serving effects for both success and failure are obtained in most but not all experimental paradigms. Processes which may suppress or even reverse the self‐serving effect were discussed. Most important, the examination of research in which self‐serving effects are obtained suggested that these attributions are better understood in motivational than in information‐processing terms.

Consistency and bias in the attribution of attitudes.

This article is based on the proposition that people attribute a disposition to an actor by evaluating its consistency with other information about the actor or the situation. This strategy is assumed to be accompanied by a cognitive set or bias to view ambiguous information as consistent with the hypothesized disposition. Respondents were told that a student had chosen or had been assigned to write a proabortion or antiabortion paper, and they were or were not given an ambiguous description of the author's personality. In support of predictions, under choice conditions attitudes were always attributed in accordance with the paper's position, but under assignment conditions such attributions occurred only when respondents received the ambiguous personality description. A central focus of attribution theory is the extent to which an actor's behavior provides information about his or her stable underlying dispositions (cf. Ajzen, 1971; Jones & Davis, 1965; Steiner, 1970). Most analyses of the attribution process (e.g., Heider, 1958; Jones & Davis, 1965; Kelley, 1967) have likened observers to naive scientists who, except for a few motivational biases, make systematic use of the information available to them. It has recently been suggested, however, that instead of using sophisticated information-processing strategies, people rely on rather simple intuitive heuristics (Tversky and Kahneman, 1974) or cognitive scripts (Abelson, 1976) in making their judgments (see Slovic, Fischhoff, & Lichtenstein, 1977, for a review). Although these intuitive strategies often produce reasonable judgments, they are said to be capable of leading to systematic biases and errors (Ajzen, 1977; Kahneman & Tversky, 1973; Nisbett & Borgida, 1975). This article deals with what Ross (1977) has termed the fundamental attribution error, the assumed tendency for observers to overestimate the importance of dispositional fac

Judgment of contingency in depressed and nondepressed students: sadder but wiser?

How are humans' subjective judgments of contingencies related to objective contingencies? Work in social psychology and human contingency learning predicts that the greater the frequency of desired outcomes, the greater people's judgments of contingency will be. Second, the learned helplessness theory of depression provides both a strong and a weak prediction concerning the linkage between subjective and objective contingencies. According to the strong prediction, depressed individuals should underestimate the degree of contingency between their responses and outcomes relative to the objective degree of contingency. According to the weak prediction, depressed individuals merely should judge that there is a smaller degree of contingency between their responses and outcomes than nondepressed individuals should. In addition, the present investigation deduced a new strong prediction from the helplessness theory: Nondepressed individuals should overestimate the degree of contingency between their responses and outcomes relative to the objective degree of contingency. In the experiments, depressed and nondepressed students were present with one of a series of problems varying in the actual degree of contingency. In each problem, subjects estimated the degree of contingency between their responses (pressing or not pressing a button) and an environmental outcome (onset of a green light). Performance on a behavioral task and estimates of the conditional probability of green light onset associated with the two response alternatives provided additional measures for assessing beliefs about contingencies. Depressed students' judgments of contingency were surprisingly accurate in all four experiments. Nondepressed students, on the other hand, overestimated the degree of contingency between their responses and outcomes when noncontingent outcomes were frequent and/or desired and underestimated the degree of contingency when contingent outcomes were undesired. Thus, predictions derived from social psychology concerning the linkage between subjective and objective contingencies were confirmed for nondepressed students but not for depressed students. Further, the predictions of helplessness theory received, at best, minimal support. The learned helplessness and self-serving motivational bias hypotheses are evaluated as explanations of the results. In addition, parallels are drawn between the present results and phenomena in cognitive psychology, social psychology, and animal learning. Finally, implications for cognitive illusions in normal people, appetitive helplessness, judgment of contingency between stimuli, and learning theory are discussed.

Actors, observers, and the attribution process: Toward a reconceptualization

Jones and Nisbett hypothesize that actors attribute their actions to situational requirements whereas observers attribute the same actions to personal dispositions. This hypothesis is critically examined and a reconceptualization is proposed. Our conceptual analysis focuses on the attributional consequences of differences between actors and observers in: (a) availability of information about the contemporary and historical determinants of the actor's behavior, and (b) susceptibility to possible motivational distortions and cognitive biases. The relationship between this formulation and Jones and Nisbett's analysis of differences between self-perception and interpersonal perception is discussed.

An Attributional Analysis of Moral Judgments

This paper analyzes the psychology of moral judgment from the framework of attribution theory. The relevance of perceptions of responsibility for moral evaluation is examined along with four specific factors proposed to influence the sophistication of responsibility attributions: specification, motivational biases, linguistic usage, and attributional context. In the final section, the role played by policing mechanisms in the maintenance of moral behavior is discussed.

Effects of cooperation and competition on responsibility attribution after success and failure

Pairs of Ss cooperated (Experiment I) or competed (Experiment II) in a response-matching task whose outcome either exceeded (Success condition), met (Neutral condition), or did not reach (Failure condition) a prior-established expected outcome level. Afterwards, Ss attributed responsibility for their outcomes. It was found under both cooperation and competition that neutral outcomes tended to produce situational attribution, and success produced self-attribution. However, failure produced partner attribution under cooperation but situational attribution under competition. The results were discussed from the standpoint of two general theories of responsibility attribution, the first emphasizing problem solving based on cues, and the second emphasizing motivational biases.

Decisional analysis of the effects of limbic lesions of learning in monkeys.

In a 1969 study, K. H. Pribram, R. J. Douglas, and B. J. Pribram came to the hypothesis that behavior during discrimination learning and reversal is under control of two competing variables: the patterned cues to be discriminated and the noncontingent schedule of reinforcement. The current study using a modified decision theoretic procedure shows that in fact these two variables are operative and that noncontingent reinforcement produces a strong posi­ tion bias against discriminating. This bias is quantitatively more easily over­ come b~' normal subjects than by monkeys with hippoc'ampal-amygdala le­ sions though the strategy and tactics used are the same for both groups. Thus, hippocampus and amygdala are shown to influence attention through mechanisms that regulate motivational bias.