Chapter 6: Attribution Processes

1. Which of the following is an example of an attributional process in social cognition?

a. The act of planning the actions to take given a social situation
b. The act of reminiscing about the descriptive details of a past event or environment
c. The act of inferring the possible reasons why another person behaved in a particular way
d. None of the above

2. Causal reasoning involves utilizing knowledge about:

a. Situational circumstances
b. Other people’s dispositions
c. Similar past events
d. All of the above

3. By what age is knowledge that causes precede effects well established?

a. By age 3
b. By age 5
c. By age 6
d. This knowledge has been established to be innate

4. Which of the following is NOT a fundamental principle of cause-effect relations in everyday

reasoning?
a. Causes and effects share temporal contiguity
b. Salient stimuli are seen as more causal
c. Causes and effects share spatial contiguity
d. Causes and effects do not resemble each other

5. Which of the following is true of most children by age 2?

a. They have developed a system for representing the contents of people’s beliefs
b. They have developed a system for reasoning about other people’s minds
c. They have a fully developed theory of mind
d. They suffer from atypical theory of mind similar to that of children with autism

6. What does the concept of mind perception most closely refer to?
a. Inferences about another’s beliefs, feelings, and desires
b. The ability of the mind to distort perceptions of social situations
c. Attributions of physical properties of the brain to an immaterial mind
d. None of the above
7. Which of the following statements is FALSE?
a. People draw trait inferences from physical attributes, including facial appearance
b. Facial judgments made after a 100 millisecond exposure to faces are uncorrelated to
judgments made without time constraints
c. People can attribute dispositional characteristics to others based on very minimal cues
d. Rapid dispositional inferences from physical information has real-world consequences

8. Which of the following brain areas is implicated in theory of mind, particularly when people are
involved in social interaction?
a. Basal ganglia
b. Medial prefrontal cortex
c. Lateral temporal cortex
d. Amygdala

9. Which of the following is a fundamental assumption shared across models of attribution theory?
a. Minimal determinism
b. Models are generic
c. Motivational point of departure
d. All of the above

10. Which of the following paths are involved in Heider’s attribution theory?
a. Environment > Capacity > Action
b. Ability > Motivation > Action
c. Capacity> Environment > Action
d. Exertion > Motivation > Capacity

11. E. E. Jones and Davis’s analysis of correspondence inference was greatly influenced by which of
the following psychologists?
a. Kurt Lewin
b. Solomon Asch
c. Fritz Heider
d. Harold Kelley

12. Which of the models of social thinker best describes most models of attribution theories?
a. Cognitive miser
b. Motivated tactician
c. Naïve scientist
 d. Consistency seeker

13. Which of the following is closest to the definition of commonsense psychology?

a. Ordinary people’s everyday theories about each other
b. The belief that psychological findings can usually be inferred through common sense
c. The study of mental processes through indirect methods, such as imaging techniques
d. The social psychological study of shared sensations among social actors

14. Which of the following best describes what correspondent inference theory is about?
a. People perceive their own behavior and make attributions about their own attitudes
b. People aim to identify the intentions underlying behavior in order to infer situation-robust
dispositions
c. They ways people attempt to validate their causal attributions
d. The role of achievement and helping as motivated behaviors

15. What is the mechanism through which perceivers infer dispositions from the unique
consequences of a person’s behavior, according to Jones and Davis?
a. Consensus
b. Exogenous acts
c. Noncommon effects
d. Endogenous acts

16. Which of the following is an example of a cue that can produce rapid causal inferences about
other’s dispositions?
a. Emotional lability
b. Exertion
c. Involuntary occurrences
d. Social desirability

17. Which of the following best defines hedonic relevance?

a. The perception that the actor intended to benefit or harm the perceiver
b. Voluntary actions committed to achieve other goals
c. Whether an action helps or hinders a perceiver’s own goals
d. The increase on the value of a cause when there are no alternative causes

18. Which of the following is a component of the covariation model?

a. Distinctiveness
b. Consensus
 c. Modality
d. All of the above

19. According to the subtractive rule, which of the following is true?

a. A facilitating situation increases the diagnostic value of a behavior regarding a
corresponding disposition
b. An inhibiting situation increases the diagnostic value of a behavior regarding a
corresponding disposition
c. An inhibiting situation augments the diagnostic value of a behavior regarding a
corresponding disposition
d. None of the above

20. Which of the following best illustrates the stages proposed in Gilbert’s (1998) synthetic model?
a. Correction phase > Categorization stage > Characterization stage
b. Characterization stage > Categorization stage > Correction phase
c. Categorization stage > Correction phase > Characterization stage
d. Categorization stage > Characterization stage > Correction phase

21. Which of the following is an example of experimental procedures often used to induce cognitive
load?
a. Multi-tasking
b. Holding a pencil in one’s mouth
c. Listening to classical music in the background
d. Writing about a past event

22. According to Lieberman and colleagues (2002), which of the following brain areas is involved in
the X system?
a. Lateral prefrontal cortex
b. Rostral anterior cingulate
c. The amygdala
d. All of the above

23. The question “If this person were in the same situation in the future, would they act in the same
way?” best reflects which of the following concepts:
a. The actor-observer effect
b. Circumscribed accuracy
c. The fundamental attribution error
 d. The correspondence bias

24. Naïve realism is most closely represented in which of the following?

a. The belief that other observers don’t always see the world “as it is”
b. The tendency to take more credit than others involved in a group task
c. The tendency to take credit for successes but deny responsibility for failures
d. The belief that other people’s behaviors are due to dispositional factors

25. Defensive attribution most closely refers to:

a. Who is accountable for an adverse event
b. Why a person is accountable for an adverse event
c. People attributing more responsibility for actions that produce severe rather than mild
consequences
d. People attributing more responsibility for actions than inactions

26. When drawing inferences about a person’s behavior, which of the following best describes what
is meant by “hedonic relevance”?
a. Whether the behavior promotes or obstructs the actor’s own interests
b. The degree to which a behavior was intended to benefit others
c. The relevance of the perceiver’s goals to the observed behavior
d. The perceiver’s perception of whether the actor intended to harm or benefit the perceiver
in some way

27. Which of the following best describes what is meant by a “normative model of inference”?
a. A formal, idealized set of rules for validating attributions
b. People analyze the degree to which an actor’s behavior might be influenced by social
norms; socially-desirable behaviors are seen as less dispositionally-informative
c. Observers are more likely to infer an actor’s behavior as situationally-influenced when it is a
common, routine behavior
d. A model for inferring social norms based on the behavior of a number of people

28. Which of the following behaviors would best fit with Bem’s self-perception theory?
a. You notice that you have donated $200 to charity over the last year; you infer that you must
be a good person
b. You see another person behaving in a way that is similar to you, and infer characteristics
about yourself based on this reflected behavior
 c. You look into your refrigerator and realize that you have purchased three six-packs of soda
over the last month. You therefore assume that you really like soda.
d. You see someone behaving strangely in a particular situation, so you imagine yourself in
that situation to better understand what the target might be thinking and feeling.

29. Steven has a problem. He is on a strict diet to try and lose weight, but he also wants to make a
favorable impression on his girlfriend’s mother, who just offered him a slice of homemade
cheesecake. Which of the following neural networks would be most likely to be involved in
resolving these conflicting motivations?
a. The C system
b. The basal ganglia
c. The reticular formation system
d. The reflexive system