People typically explain others' behaviors by attributing them to the beliefs and motives of an unobservable mind. Although such attributional inferences are critical for understanding the social world, it is unclear whether they rely on processes distinct from those used to understand the nonsocial world. In the present study, we used functional MRI to identify brain regions associated with ma...

Conservatives tend to make dispositional whereas liberals make situational attributions for social problems and alleged misconduct (the "ideo-attribution effect"). Three studies demonstrated a reversal of the ideo-attribution effect. Conservatives made stronger situational attributions than liberals for the behavior of Marines accused of killing Iraqi civilians (Studies 1 and 2) and police offi...

Attribution theory argues that people assess the locus of causality of achievementrelevant events as either internal or external. Given the frequency of interpersonal interactions in organizations, we posit that a third category—relational attributions— may be used. Drawing on relational perspectives, we lay the conceptual foundation and develop a dyadic theory of relational attributions, propo...

Relativism, in the sense at issue here, is a view about the meaning of knowledge attributions—statements of the form “S knows that p.” Like contextualism, it holds that the truth of knowledge claims is sensitive to contextual factors, such as which alternatives are relevant at the context, or how high the stakes are. For the relativist, however, the relevant context is the context from which th...

In this study, we examine the role of attributions in the context of dating relationships. A large sample completed a questionnaire comprising structured ratings and a free-response relationship description. As expected, cognitive or attributional activity was more frequent within relationships when they were in the early stages, when important choice points or changes were occurring, and when ...

How much are people’s responsibility attributions affected by intended versus actual contributions in group contexts? A novel experimental-game paradigm dissociated intended from actual contributions: good intentions could result in bad outcomes and bad intentions in good ones. Participants acted as external judges and attributed responsibility to computer players engaging in a repeated game. O...

We typically explain other people's behaviors by attributing them to the beliefs and motives of an unobservable mind. Although such attributional inferences are critical for understanding the social world, it is unclear whether they rely on processes distinct from those used to understand the nonsocial world. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to identify brain regions associated wit...

The authors evaluate three models of the cognitive processes underlying person perception (i.e., the processes perceivers use to judge whether an actor’s behavior reflects a personal disposition), each of which implies a different way in which culturally instilled lay theories of behavior affect attributions. The models make distinctive predictions concerning how cognitive busyness will affect ...

The authors tested an attribution-affect model of schizophrenic relapse attending to the role of families' positive affect (warmth) and negative affect (criticism). Coders listened to interviews of 40 family members taken from C. E. Vaughn, K. S. Synder, S. Jones, W. B. Freeman, and I. R. Falloon (1984) and rated their attributions of controllability for the symptoms and behaviors of their rela...

The Seroconversion Narratives for AIDS Prevention (SNAP) study elicited narratives from recently infected seropositive gay and bisexual men that described the circumstances of their own seroconversion. This analysis of the narratives explored participants' attributions of responsibility for HIV prevention before and after they became infected. Before becoming infected with HIV, responsibility f...