This article presents a scale that measures chronic individual differences in people's uncertainty about their ability to understand and detect cause-and-effect relationships in the social world: the Causal Uncertainty Scale (CUS). The results of Study 1 indicated that the scale has good internal and adequate test-retest reliability. Additionally, the results of a factor analysis suggested that the scale appears to be tapping a single construct. Study 2 examined the convergent and discriminant validity of the scale, and Studies 3 and 4 examined the predictive and incremental validity of the scale. The importance of the CUS to work on depressives' social information processing and for basic research and theory on human social judgment processes is discussed.

This study examined the extent to which chronic causal uncertainty beliefs influence diagnostic information seeking. Situational factors intended to increase the excitation level of causal uncertainty beliefs and the intensity of goal-directed behavior also were investigated. Participants expected to interview either a gender in-group or a gender out-group member, and half of them expected to be held accountable for their understanding of the interviewee. For out-group conditions, those accountable participants who possessed chronically accessible causal uncertainty beliefs revealed the greatest preference for diagnostic information. For in-group conditions, no differential pattern of information seeking as a function of chronic causal uncertainty beliefs or goal importance were found. Results are discussed in terms of a recent model of motivated social cognition proposed by G. Weary and J. A. Edwards (1996).

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Two studies explored depressives' sensitivity to social information as an impediment to their gaining a sense of confidence and control. In Study 1, Ss viewed a videotape of an actor performing an achievement task and were asked to list their impressions of the actor. As compared with nondepressed Ss, depressed Ss generated more inferences overall, generated more abstract inferences, and exhibited less overall confidence in their impression of the actor. In Study 2, Ss reported their beliefs of the utility of information about a person's past behaviors and personality for understanding, predicting future behavior, and describing that person. Depressed Ss expressed more interest than did nondepressed Ss in both types of information but were less confident of the utility of the information for prediction.