Cultural difference in attribution of performance: An integration-theoretical analysis.

Abstract

Heider's suggestion that Performance = Motivation X Ability has been empirically confirmed by Anderson and Butzin and by Kun, Parsons, and Ruble, using American students as subjects. This multiplying process failed to appear in the present series of three experiments performed on Indian college students. Contrary to the predicted linear fan pattern, the plot of Motivation X Ability effect displayed clear parallelism. An equal-weight averaging rule was able to account for the results obtained in both group and single-subject analyses. Perhaps the integration rules underlying achievement judgments are culture-specific, and Indian college students average motivation and ability information in attribution of future scholastic performance. These results illustrate the potential power that information integration theory provides for the cross-cultural study of social perception and cognition.How do people integrate information a'bout motivation and ability when they predict performance? Heider (1958) made the following suggestion:The personal constituents, namely, power (ability) and trying (effort) are related as a multiplicative combination, since the effective personal force (performance) is zero if either of them is zero. For instance, if a person has the ability but does not try at all he will make no progress toward the goal. (p. 83) If Heider's proposal is correct, then attribu-

An Integration Theoretical Analysis of Expected Job Attractiveness and Satisfaction*

“…But the same pattern can also be produced by a conjunctive averaging rule with differential weighting (Singh et al 1979b). If negative job factors have greater weight, then the averaging model would produce an approximate linear fan shape.…”

“…The multiplying rule requires that the dashed curve form part of the linear fan. The averaging rule, on the contrary, implies that the dashed curve should cross over at least one solid curve (Anderson 1981;Singh et al 1979a;Singh et al 1979b). Figs.…”

Social Inference

“…Algebraic models for perception of causes have received a massive amount of empirical support and are also intuitively convincing (most recently, Singh et al 1979, Surber 1981a. We would argue that this is a second set of processes involved in causal reasoning andl, for the moment, distinguish them from the hypothesis-testing processes.…”

Causal Analyses in Interpersonal Relations: On Importance of the Control Condition

“…While the simple designs will diagnose the similarity-dissimilarity asymmetry in attraction and admiration responses, the two-factor design would determine whether similarity and dissimilarity were weighted equally or unequally in the two dependent variables. As is well known, an equal weighting of cues engenders a pattern of parallelism in the factorial plot of the two-way interaction effect (e.g., Anderson, 1981;Singh & Bhargava, 1985Singh, Bohra, & Dalal, 1979;Singh, Gupta, & Dalal, 1979); an unequal weighting, on the other hand, produces a pattern of nonparallelism (e. g., Anderson, 1981;Singh, 1991;Singh & Singh, 1994;Srivastava & Singh, 1988). Of the various forms of nonparallelism, the patterns of divergence and convergence imply a greater weighting of the negative and positive cues, respectively (e.g., Birnbaum, 1972Birnbaum, , 1974Ostrom & Davis, 1979;Skowronski & Carlston, 1987).…”