Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [283]
—Male college students were asked by the psychologist Stuart Valins to look at slides of nude women and rate their attractiveness. While looking at them, each man, through earphones, heard what was supposedly his own heartbeat but was in reality recorded sound controlled by Valins. The lub-dub, lub-dub the volunteers heard was speeded up when they looked at certain slides but not others. When they later rated the appeal of the women, they named as particularly attractive those who seemed to have caused their heartbeat to speed up.
—Volunteers given false reports of how well they had done on tests tended to attribute supposed success to their own efforts or abilities, supposed failure to external causes such as the unfairness of the test, distracting noises, and so on.
—Researchers asked a group of nursery school children who had previously enjoyed drawing with multicolored felt-tip pens to play with them in order to receive Good Player awards. They asked a control group to play with the pens but said nothing about an award. Some time later, both groups were given access to the pens during free-play periods. The children who had received awards were much less interested in using them than the no-award group. The attributional interpretation: children who had expected a reward implicitly thought, “If I do it for the reward, I must not find drawing with it very interesting.”
Since the 1980s attribution theory has been largely absorbed into the broader field of “social cognition,” or the study of how people think about social issues, an expansive domain that includes such intriguing topics as self-fulfilling prophecies, how attitudes affect behavior, persuasion and attitude change, stereotyping and prejudice, and much more. Within that framework attribution remains a central concept in contemporary social psychology. It has added substantially to psychology’s patchwork explanation of human behavior.
It has also yielded a number of practical applications in education (students are led to attribute their failures to lack of effort rather than inability), the treatment of depression (depressed persons are induced to minimize their sense of personal responsibility for negative events in their lives), the improvement of performance and motivation of fearful and defeatist persons (they are led to attribute feared failures to lack of practice and skill rather than to character defects), and so on.61
Many other topics of both scientific interest and potential practical value have been explored by social psychologists in recent years and continue to be actively researched. Here are some of them, along with a few sample findings of each:
Interpersonal relations: Communication between spouses, friends, coworkers, and others, often ambiguous and misinterpreted, is usually much improved by experience in T-groups (T for training), therapy groups, and marital counseling. Participants are alerted to their own communication flaws and made more sensitive to what others are saying… Rules for clear and fair argument, taught to spouses in conflict, can considerably improve their communication and relationship… Only a fraction (possibly less than a tenth) of the information in emotional communications is conveyed by the words, the rest by body language, eye contact or avoidance, distance maintained between persons, and the like; nonverbal communication skills, too, can be taught… Guilt has social benefits; it protects and strengthens interpersonal relationships by, among other things, keeping people from acting in ways that would harm their relationships… Jealousy has adaptive functions, serving to keep mates together (signals of jealousy by one partner may inhibit the other from straying).62
Mass communication and persuasion: Political, sales, and other presentations that do not indicate in advance that they will attempt to persuade are more successful