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Causal Attributions Across the Adult Life Span: The Influence of Social Schemas, Life Context, and Domain Specificity
Author(s) -
BLANCHARDFIELDS FREDDA
Publication year - 1996
Publication title -
applied cognitive psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.719
H-Index - 100
eISSN - 1099-0720
pISSN - 0888-4080
DOI - 10.1002/(sici)1099-0720(199611)10:7<137::aid-acp431>3.0.co;2-z
Subject(s) - psychology , attribution , developmental psychology , context (archaeology) , life span , social psychology , cognition , attribution bias , social cognition , social environment , social perception , cognitive psychology , perception , gerontology , paleontology , medicine , neuroscience , political science , law , biology
Causal attribution tasks involving negative relationship situations reveal age differences in attributional responding, including a greater degree of dispositional attributions on the part of older adults. However, we also find variability in these age differences as a function of the particular content domain in question. This may be accounted for by individual differences in the content of social schematic beliefs evoked by certain situations. Accordingly, age and/or generational differences were demonstrated in the frequency of different schemas produced for different social dilemmas. The relevance and strength of the social schemas that have been elicited in these types of situations may be important factors in understanding when adults will engage in complex, in‐depth reasoning about a situation and when they will rely on automatically activated social rules leading to dispositional attributions. A new method of measuring age/cohort differences in schematicity is described that will be used to examine the relationship between social schematicity and attributional processing.