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The role of social perspective in perceiving the causes of success and failure 1
Author(s) -
Arkin Robert M.,
Gabrenya William K.,
McGarvey Bill
Publication year - 1978
Publication title -
journal of personality
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.082
H-Index - 144
eISSN - 1467-6494
pISSN - 0022-3506
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-6494.1978.tb00196.x
Subject(s) - attribution , psychology , perspective (graphical) , social psychology , observer (physics) , perspective taking , social perception , social cognition , cognitive psychology , perception , cognition , empathy , artificial intelligence , physics , quantum mechanics , neuroscience , computer science
A bstract An experiment was conducted to test the hypothesis that observers' causal attributions about an actor's performance at a task would be affected by their social perspective in observing the situation. Observer subjects were either assigned to serve in a role comparable to that of observer‐subjects in most actor‐observer experiments or were assigned a distinctive role more divergent from the social perspective of the actor. As expected, observers with a similar social perspective to that of the actor made more flattering attributions about the actor's performance than observers with a dissimilar social perspective. We concluded that actor‐observer differences in attribution for an actor's performance in any one experiment cannot be taken as definitive evidence either for or against the defensive attribution idea.