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Attribution difficulty and memory for attribution-relevant information.

D L Hamilton1, P D Grubb, D A Acorn

  • 1Department of Psychology, University of California, Santa Barbara 93106.

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
|November 1, 1990
PubMed
Summary
This summary is machine-generated.

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Making attributional inferences is easier when context clearly points to a cause. Difficult inferences, however, enhance memory for events and context details, while reducing attribution confidence.

Area of Science:

  • Cognitive Psychology
  • Social Psychology

Background:

  • Attribution theory explains how individuals interpret causes of behavior.
  • Understanding attributional inference processing is key to cognitive and social psychology.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To compare information processing and retrieval for attributional inferences under varying difficulty levels.
  • To investigate how inference difficulty influences recall and confidence in attributions.

Main Methods:

  • Participants made attributions for behavioral events based on context sentences.
  • Context sentences implied either the person or situation as the causal agent.
  • Inference difficulty was manipulated by varying the consistency of context clues.

Main Results:

Related Experiment Videos

  • Difficult attributional inferences led to increased recall of behavioral events and context sentences.
  • Participants exhibited lower confidence in their attributions when inferences were difficult.
  • Information incongruent with the majority context was recalled more frequently in difficult inference conditions.

Conclusions:

  • Inference difficulty significantly impacts memory retrieval and confidence levels in attribution.
  • Cognitive processing is modulated by the ease or difficulty of making causal attributions.
  • Further research can explore the implications for decision-making and judgment.