Perceivers' Explanations of Their Attributions of Attitudel

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

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