The how and what of why: Some determinants and consequences of causal attribution. (Doctoral dissertation

Kelley's attribution theory is investigated. Subjects filled out a questionnaire that reported 16 different responses ostensibly made by other people. These responses represented four verb categories—emotions, accomplishments, opinions, and actions—and, for experimental subjects, each was accompanied by high or low consensus information, high or low distinctiveness information, and high or low consistency information. Control subjects were not given any informa-tion regarding the response. All subjects were asked to attribute each response to characteristics of the person (i.e., the actor), the stimulus, the circum-stances, or to some combination of these three factors. In addition, the sub-jects ' expectancies for future response and stimulus generalization on the part of the actor were measured. The three information variables and verb category each had a significant effect on causal attribution and on expectancy for behavioral generalization. Identifying the cause of an event gives it "meaning, " since causal knowledge carries with it a wide scope of connotations regarding an event and makes possible a more or less stable, predictable, and controllable world. What an individual expects from his environ-ment and what he does to influence it will undoubtedly depend on his beliefs about causality. Hence, the psychologist who searches for the causes of man's behavior may do well to consider man's belief about causality. This is the focus of attribution theory, which represents an attempt to de-termine the antecedents and consequences of some of man's causal beliefs. More specifically, it concerns the processes through which an individual assigns causes to various responses he makes or observes and the consequences of his resulting beliefs about causality. Whil