THE EFFECTS OF BEHAVIORAL, SITUATIONAL, AND PERSON INFORMATION ON DIFFERENT ATTRIBUTION JUDGMENTS

Two experiments that test several issues in the attribution literature were performed. In Experiment 1, subjects were told that a target per son had performed a particular behavior and were also given informatio n about the personality of the person and whether situational forces e ncouraged the behavior. Behaviors were related either to partially res trictive schemata or hierarchically restrictive schemata (see Reeder & Brewer, 1979). Trait attributions generally showed that behavior, per son, and situation information all had effects but that the effects of behavior were greater, and the effects of situation and person inform ation less, for the hierarchically restrictive traits. Subjects were a lso asked for traditional internal and external causality judgments. I n general, judgments of internal causality were more responsive to per son information and judgments of external causality more responsive to situational information suggesting that previous demonstrations of pe rceivers' tendencies to underutilize situational information may be du e, in part, to the ways attributions have been measured. In Experiment 2, subjects made trait attributions, but also explained the reasons b ehind them. These open-ended responses suggest that there are differen t reasoning processes underlying the use of the two types of schemata. (C) 1994 Academic Press. Inc.