The Effects of Consensus, Distinctiveness and Consistency on Situation and Person Attributions

616 Words3 Pages
Abstract In making attributions for behavior, individuals will encounter information patterns indicating stimulus, person, or circumstance causation. The aim of this study is to investigate the influence of consensus, distinctiveness and consistency information on person and situational attributional judgments. Participants; fifteen second year psychology students; answered 24-hypothetical Events Questionnaire individually, coded their responses, exchanged questionnaires, tallied and rated each question, then analyzed their class’s results (dependent samples t-test). The study supported the hypotheses high consensus causes more situation attributions than low however, did not support high distinctiveness causes more situation attributions than low; and high consistency causes more situation attributions than low. Results confirmed consensus, distinctiveness, and consistency effected person and situational attributional judgments but varied in ratings for different conditions. Implications; behavior varies in situation and achievement than in interpersonal settings; there is more consistency in an individual's response to a similar stimulus than with other’s responses to the stimulus. Results From the results collected, the raw data was then processed using the software; SPSS 18 (refer to Appendix). A paired-samples t-test was used to compare the number of situation judgments made by fifteen second year psychology undergraduate students in high consensus, low consensus, high distinctiveness, low distinctiveness, high consistency, and low consistency conditions. The correlations results were omitted as it was unsuitable for the study. There were no violations of assumptions and an alpha level of .05 was used for the statistical test. Table-1 Means and Standard Deviations of Types of Information for Each Condition

More about The Effects of Consensus, Distinctiveness and Consistency on Situation and Person Attributions

Open Document