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Abstract

Subjects attributed attitudes to a target person who had produced an essay on a social issue. The target was described as having a choice in defending a position (pro or anti) or being assigned a position. A variant of the latter condition included a prompting cue which consisted of asking subjects to rate the target's degree of choice. Inferences of attitude were most correspondent with essay position in the choice condition and least correspondent in the prompted condition. The prompting cue thus sensitized perceivers to the target's constraint. Only 28% of subjects who judged a target under constraint explicitly mentioned the constraint factor when explaining their attribu tions, a result supportive of Jones and Nisbett's (1971) thesis.

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References

Jones, E.E. , & Harris, V.A. The attribution of attitudes. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 1967, 3, 1-24.

Jones, E.E. , & Nisbett, R. The actor and the observer: Divergent perceptions of the causes of behavior . In E. E. Jones , D. Kanouse , H. H. Kelley , R. E. Nisbett , S. Valins , & B. Weiner. Attribution: Perceiving the causes of behavior. Morristown, N. J.: General Learning Press, 1971.

Jones, E.E. , Worchel, S. , Goethals, G.R. , & Grumet, J.F. Prior expectancy and behavioral extremity as determinants of attitude attribution . Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 1971, 7, 59-80.

Miller, A.G. Constraint and target effects in the attribution of attitudes. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 1976, 12, 325-339.

Shaver, K.G. An introduction to attribution processes. Cambridge, Mass. : Winthrop, 1975.

Perceivers' Explanations of Their Attributions of Attitudel

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