Attribution of Responsibility Implied in a Notice of Acceptance or Rejection

Abstract

200 college students reported which of 2 messages they would send, as representatives of a social club, to a person whose application to join the club had been accepted or rejected. One message had the effect of assigning less internal responsibility to the sender (S) for the decision than did the other. Ss were randomly assigned to send either an acceptance or a rejection notice and were randomly assigned to one of two message pairs which differed in the manner in which the locus of control for the decision was varied. When the results from both message conditions are combined, the difference between the proportion of “internal responsibility” messages in the accept versus the rejection conditions is significant (p < .06), indicating that Ss tend to imply more internal responsibility in the acceptance notices they send and more external responsibility in their rejection notices. There is a rather weak curvilinear relationship between the message chosen to send in the rejection condition and S‘s Machiavellianism score, with very high and very low Machs being the most apt to select the external responsibility note to send to the applicant.