Intergroup attribution: The role of social categories in causal attribution for behaviour

Abstract

The present study was designed to investigate the effects of group membership on observers' attributional processes. It was hypothesized that an observer's pattern of attribution for success and failure will be a function of the outgroup's relative status, and that more severe rules for the attribution of responsibility would be applied to high prestige actors. One hundred and twenty female undergraduate students, classified as either internal or external on Rotter's (1966) I-E scale, made causal attributions for success and failure within the study's 2(I-E) × 3(ingroup/high esteem outgroup/low esteem outgroup) × 2(success/failure) experimental design. The results offered partial support for the study's hypotheses. Primarily the results suggest that similar rules of accountability may operate for both the high esteem outgroup and the ingroup. As for the low esteem outgroup, the pattern of attribution reflects the ambivalence predicted for the subjects in their explanation of the low esteem outgroup's performance. The findings also indicated that internals employed differential dispositional factors to account for the high and low esteem outgroups' performance. The conceptual importance of the findings was discussed with regard to the concepts of responsibility and social categorization.