Search

In the 20th century, a number of changes to the office of the American presidency have marked its transition from traditional to modern. These changes may be associated with changes in the manner in which modern and traditional presidents present themselves. Inaugural addresses of American presidents were scored for the usage of each of five self-presentational strategies — ingratiation, intimidation, exemplification, self-promotion, and supplication. We predicted that ingratiation and intimidation would appear more in the inaugural addresses of modern than traditional presidents, whereas there would be no differences in the inclusion of exemplification, self-promotion, and supplication in the inaugural addresses of modern and traditional presidents. The results supported the predictions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two experiments tested the proposition that people use consensus-raising excuses more in private than in public when the audience has information that could refute subjects' claims about others. In Experiment 1, subjects received success or failure feedback and made public or private attributions to ability, effort, task difficulty, and luck. In Experiment 2, subjects received positive or negative feedback and evaluated themselves and others on the trait Task difficulty attributions and evaluations of others are consensus-raising measures Consistent with our hypothesis, subjects receiving negative feedback in Experiment 1 claimed that the task was more difficult, and in Experiment 2 evaluated the other more negatively in private than in public. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Weiner et al. have proposed a model of attributions for task performance that categorizes achievement attributions in terms of an internal/external dimension and a stable/unstable dimension. The present study proposes a modification of the model to include external power factors relevant to an individual or an environment. It was hypothesized that promotions would elicit attributions of external power relevant to an individual (e.g., social class) and demotions would elicit attributions of external power relevant to the environment (e.g., corruption). It was also hypothesized that Americans would make attributions to internal factors (ability and effort) more than would Indians and that Indians would make attributions to external power factors more than would Americans. To this end, 87 American and 131 Indian college students read about a worker who was promoted or demoted in a job and attributed the promotion or demotion to internal, external, and external power factors. The results supported the hypotheses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examined the proposition that blacks and whites make dispositional attributions for an in-group's positive behaviors and an out-group's negative behaviors. The study also examined whether this positive in-group bias was caused by dislike of the out-group or belief in a stereotype. Thus, blacks and whites made attributions to black and white others who succeeded or failed on tasks for which there was either no stereotype or a more negative stereotype of whites than of blacks. An out-group other's failure on both tasks was attributed to lack of ability more than was an in-group other's failure. This finding suggests that the in-group bias is caused by dislike of the out-group. Furthermore, in success conditions subjects' attributions to the in-group or out-group other did not differ. It was suggested that these attributions may result from a combination of an in-group bias and a polarized appraisal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the factors that effect the assignment of personal responsibility. It examines the social learning theory where it focuses on perceiver's degree of internality. The more an individual is able to control his negative outcomes the more is he held responsible for them. In this theory control is equivalent to expectancy. Perceivers must then take an event's expectancy into account when assigning responsibility. The failure of an individual to avoid the negative outcome makes him more instrumental in producing the observed effects and therefore more responsible. The consideration of both balance and hedonic principles suggests a curvilinear relationship between severity and the assignment of responsibility. It is also possible that any effects of expectancy and severity are dependent upon the sex of the perceiver. The devaluation was specific to what the expectancy manipulation indicated about the individual. Blame was initially assessed because it seemed to be a synonym for responsibility. The correlation between the blame and responsibility measures and the effect that expectancy had on both measures attests to the similarity of the terms.

The article proposes that in public distance speakers use hand gestures more than smiles as the primary form of nonverbal communication. Researchers have observed that nonverbal behavior served a number of functions in social interactions and was affected by self-presentational motivation. Hand gestures have been associated with power and dominance. People must exaggerate their voice, gestures and body stance to get their message across. To test the foregoing proposition, one of the experimenters and a highly trained assistant independently rated the frequency of hand gestures and smiles in videotapes of the first inaugural addresses of several presidents of the U.S. The experimenter and rater rated the addresses with the sound turned off to avoid contamination of the nonverbal ratings by verbal cues. Wilcoxon's signed ranks test were used to compare the numbers of hand gestures and miles. As predicted, the presidents used more hand gestures than they did smiles. An ancillary finding was that two presidents did not smile at all. Perhaps the types of nonverbal behaviors that presidents use in their inaugural addresses have changed as television has become an increasing part of people's lives.

The article examines whether making excuses is affected by self-presentation concerns of people who are socially anxious. Socially anxious people publicly explain their performances in a modest or conservative manner. Attributions to luck and attributions to task difficulty are consensus-raising excuses, because they involve claims about others. Thus, among the excuses that people make for failure are claims that bad luck could happen to anyone, or that the task was so difficult everyone would have failed. The study presented in the article predicted that participants with high social anxiety would moderate their use of consensus-raising excuses more when they expected to discuss their responses with the experimenter than when they expected to keep their responses private. Specifically, it predicted that socially anxious participants would attribute their failure less to luck and the difficulty of the task in public than in private. The participants were 127 undergraduates at a U.S. state university. The hypothesis was supported on the measure assessing attributions to luck. An analysis of variance yielded an interaction between social anxiety, publicness, and favorability of feedback. Tests of the simple effects of public/private at levels of social anxiety and favorability of feedback revealed that socially anxious participants attributed failure less to luck in public than in private. There were no significant effects for social anxiety on the task difficulty measure.

The article tests for self-serving attributional bias among black and white subjects. People tend to attribute their successes to internal factors and their failures to external factors. This bias has been referred to as the self-serving attributional bias and has been demonstrated predominantly with White subjects in the United States. One purpose of the present investigation was to test for this bias among Black subjects a Research has found that effort is an important explanation for outcomes among Black children hence, a second purpose was to determine whether Black college students also attribute their outcomes to effort. Thirty-five Black and 35 White male and female undergraduates at an American state university participated in the study for extra credit in their introductory psychology courses during 1983. One White male was eliminated from the analysis because he was suspicious of the manipulations. Subjects completed a bogus Social Perceptiveness Scale (SPS). While they tilled out a questionnaire on friendships, the experimenter ostensibly scored their SPS. The experimenter then informed them that they bad suc- ceeded or failed. While the experimenter supposedly scored the second scale, subjects filled out a questionnaire concerning their performance on the SPS.

Milgram proposed that urbanites adapt to the overload in the city by being indifferent to others. Consequently, he hypothesized that in cities people help others less often than in small towns. Some evidence suggests that rather than people in cities helping others less than people in towns, people in cities are less likely to make fine discriminations between unimportant others than are people in towns. Specifically Hansson and Slade found that people in towns returned a lost letter less often when the addressee was deviant than nondeviant, while people in a city returned a lost letter equally often whether the addressee was deviant or nondeviant. Their manipulation of deviancy-nondeviancy was whether or not the addressee was affiliated with the Communist party. The present study replicated Hansson and Slade's study and employed as a manipulation of deviancy-nondeviancy whether or not the addressee was affiliated with a homosexual organization. While Levitt and Klassen report that rural people were more fearful of homosexuals, 80.9% of their sample preferred not to associate with homosexuals. Thus a homosexual affiliation is an appropriate manipulation of deviancy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A provocative issue in the study of narcissism concerns the possible interpersonal consequences of this personality style. The focus of the present study was to demonstrate that the entitlement factor of narcissism is more interpersonally aversive than is the factor of self-absorption. One hundred ninety-four participants viewed a video taped dramatization of either a male or female depicting either entitlement or self-absorption. Results indicated that participants did not discriminate between the factors of entitlement and self-absorption. However, participants who viewed either the entitled or self-absorbed role enactments by a woman reported experiencing significantly greater negative affect, were significantly more rejecting of the target, and perceived the target to be more psychologically dysfunctional, than those who viewed the same role enactments by a man. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]