Attribution theory aims to explain people’s judgments about the cause of some behavior or outcome, often involving other people. The theory has proven to be broadly applicable and points towards important aspects of human cognition. This relevance is perhaps unsurprising given that attribution theory is a type of causal inference. However, there has been relatively little work on attribution theory in relation to causal learning. More specifically, previous literature has mostly examined attributions and their behavioral and motivational outcomes following a single observation, rather than capturing the dynamics of causal attribution (i.e., how those judgments shift as people observe more vignettes and thereby learn about the situation). We thus ran an exploratory study using a vignette design to investigate whether attributions and their outcomes change across multiple instances of observation and behavior adaptation.

Authors:

Dana Kulzhabayeva: University of Toronto; Joseph Jay Williams: University of Toronto; David Danks: University of California, San Diego