Perceivers' Explanations of Their Attributions of Attitudel
- 1 December 1976
- journal article
- research article
- Published by SAGE Publications in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin
- Vol. 3 (1) , 111-114
- https://doi.org/10.1177/014616727600300120
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.Keywords
This publication has 3 references indexed in Scilit:
- Constraint and target effects in the attribution of attitudesJournal of Experimental Social Psychology, 1976
- Prior expectancy and behavioral extremity as determinants of attitude attributionJournal of Experimental Social Psychology, 1971
- The attribution of attitudesJournal of Experimental Social Psychology, 1967