Pinning down attributions: the linguistic category model applied to wrestling reports

Implicit attributions in media coverage of wrestling;events are investigate d A special feature of show wrestling is a separation in morally good fight ers who win because of their intrinsic goodness and morally bad fighters wh o win by bending the rules. Thus, show wrestling can be characterized by th e attributions it affords. Linguistic abstractness as an index of attributi ons of dispositionality is measured with the Linguistic Category Model (LCM ; Semin & Fiedler, 1988). Analyses of published fight reports in an officia l wrestling magazine show that goodness and badness is indeed attributed on a stable and global level and that fights with the expected outcome are de scribed in terms of fighters' dispositions in contrast to fights with an un expected outcome. (C) 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.