Do People Agree About the Causes of Behavior? A Social Relations Analysis of Behavior Ratings and Causal Attributions.

Abstract

Two studies examined consistency and agreement in behavior ratings and causal attributions. In Study 1, participants (N = 280) engaged in a series of getting-acquainted conversations in one of 3 communication media (face-to-face, telephone, computer mediated); in Study 2, participants (N = 120) engaged in a competitive group task. In both studies, participants rated themselves and their interaction partners on a set of behaviors and then made attributions about the causes of those behaviors. The major findings were that (a) participants consistently favored some causal factors over others in explaining both their own and their partners' behavior, supporting the existence of generalized attributional styles; and (b) participants showed moderate self-partner and partner-partner agreement about behavior but virtually no agreement about the causes of behavior. Thus, in brief interactions people tend to see themselves and others through the lens of their stable patterns of perceiving and interpreting behavior.

Visible markers of brain injury influence attributions for adolescents’ behaviour

“…In the bandage condition, the bandage makes the injury more salient [10]. The findings are also consistent with the view that people tend to explain others' behaviour in the same way they explain their own behaviour [12]. Most participants would not have experienced a brain injury, whereas all would have experienced adolescence, which is the preferred explanation in the no bandage condition.…”

“…Robins et al [12] showed that people's attributions for others' behaviour reflects their attributions for their own behaviour. Applied to brain injury, this finding implies that when a person with brain injury looks like a normal adolescent and they lose their temper, observers may attribute the behaviour to the person's adolescence, because they performed similar behaviours when they were adolescents.…”

Privacy attitudes and privacy‐related behavior

“…Crittenden, 1983;Johnson, & Drobny, 1985;Griffin, Babin, & Attaway, 1996;Pierro, Mannetti, Kruglanski, & Sleeth-Keppler, 2004;Robins, Mendelsohn, Connell, & Kwan, 2004;Wang, 2004). Of the studies in motivation, framing, learning, attribution, attitude, and combinations therein, this review contains those that contribute strongly to the understanding of attribution bias, which is quite relevant to the topic at hand.…”

Building interpersonal trust within organizations: a relational signalling perspective

“…''Individuals get too much credit when things go well and too much blame when things go poorly'' (Moon and Conlon 2002, p. 33). Finally, Robbins et al (2004) concluded from experiments with unfamiliar individuals in relatively brief interactions where the emotional stakes were low, that people are consistent in the way they perceive and explain (attribute) behaviour, regardless of the particular interaction situation or the particular individual whose behaviour is judged. This suggests that it is ''general schemas, such as implicit theories, [that] drive causal attributions'' (Robbins et al 2004, p. 341), rather than complex, person-and situation-specific models, such as proposed, for example, by Mayer et al (1995).…”