Peter A. White

Ambiguity in the internal/external distinction in causal attribution

Many studies of causal attribution have used measures of internal (or personal) and external (or situational) attribution. Two studies are reported which show that this distinction is ambiguous because both halves of it confound a distinction between behavior seen as conscious, intentional, and done for reasons which may involve reference to either internal or external factors and behavior seen as unconscious, unintentional, and deteministically caused, again by factors which may be either internal or external to the actor. Future studies should use measures which are unconfounded with respect to this distinction.

Use of prior beliefs in the assignment of causal roles: causal powers versus regularity-based accounts

There is a tradition of models of causal judgment in which causes and other causal roles are defined and identified in terms of empirical patterns of association with effects. In the present experiments, results conflicting with the predictions of such models were obtained. In one experiment, subjects judged that an interpretation in which a factor constantly present was identified as the cause was more likely than was an interpretation in which a perfect positive covariate was identified as the cause. In a second experiment, possible effects of prior beliefs about covariation were controlled and similar findings were obtained in two out of three scenarios. These results favor the idea that people make causal judgments by applying preexisting beliefs framed in terms of causal concepts, such as causal powers, and in ways that cannot be accounted for by models in the empiricist tradition.

Availability heuristic and judgements of letter frequency

Evidence from 175 adults is reported which suggests, contrary to the study by Tversky and Kahneman (1973), that people do not use the availability heuristic to make judgements of letter frequency.