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Subjects were given a transmission or reception set before or after viewing a videotape of an event which involved an extreme outcome. The results indicated that transmitters made relatively extreme attributions to plausible causal agents when the set was given prior but not subsequent to viewing the event. The results also showed that subjects who had been given a transmission set before viewing the videotape exhibited relatively high recognition of aspects of the event they observed. It is suggested that the data provide support for an encoding interpretation of transmission-reception differences in the attribution of causality.Zajonc (1960) defined cognitive tuning in terms of an individual's principal role in the communication process (i.e., whether a person's task was to transmit or to receive information). Tuning sets are thought to affect the flexibility of an individual's cognitive structure, which in turn may affect impressions formed about others. Individuals set to transmit information are hypothesized to have a relatively fixed and polarized cognitive structure which results in the exclusion of contradictory information. Receivers, on the other hand, should tend to have a more open and flexible cognitive structure, resulting in more openness to contradictory information.Consistent with Zajonc's (1960) formulation, Cohen (1961 found that individuals expecting to transmit an impression were more prone to suppress contradictory information and exhibited more polarized impressions than did expectant receivers. Leventhal (1962) reported that expectant transmitters developed more simplified and unified impressions than did expectant receivers. Brock and Fromkin (1968) found that expectant transmitters chose to listen more to information supportive of their initial impressions of another person than did expectant receivers. Mazis (1973) extended the tuning formulation beyond person perception and found that expectant transmitters

Throughout the history of psychology, researchers and theorists have debated the status of verbal reports. For example, personality theorists have speculated on the advisability of employing direct versus indirect measures of individuals' feelings, needs, and motives and have addressed questions about individuals' ability and willingness to accurately report on their own covert responses. Behaviourists and cognitive psychologists have debated subjects' verbalizable awareness of influential stimuli in classical conditioning and operant conditioning paradigms. Researchers in social psychology have discussed the merits of asking subjects to predict how they would behave in particular situations rather than employing deception, and have debated the advantages and disadvantages of using direct and indirect measures of attitudes. More recently, Nisbett and Wilson (1977) asserted:

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It is argued that Heider's conception of the relationship between perceptual and attributional processes has not received sufficient attention. The distinction between the phenomenal description of perception and Heider's causal analysis of the perceptual process is presented. It is noted that Heider's attribution theory may best be viewed as a comprehensive formulation of the naive, implicit principles that underlie the perception of social objects and that his emphasis is on an underlying flow, a causal stream from the distal stimulus to the final percept, rather than only on subprocesses such as the phenomenology of the perceiver.