The dispositional shift in attribution over time

Actors, Observers, and Attributions for Third World Poverty: Contrasting Perspectives from Malawi and Australia

“…Yet our Malawian students' explanations for their opinions about giving remained rooted in the Malawian experience; even their reasons against giving were dominated by a well-known Malawian adage. Moreover, just as dispositional attributions may derive resilience from cultural beliefs in personality (Jellison & Green, 198 1;Moore, Sherrod, Liu, & Underwood, 1979), situational attributions may also become resilient whenever cultural beliefs emphasize social context (as they do in Malawi; Pandey, Sinha, Prakash, & Tripathi, 1982;Smith & Bond, 1993). Overall, therefore, it seems unlikely that the cross-cultural differences in terms of situational attributions were due entirely to self-reflection on the part of the Malawians.…”

Social Inference

“…Research on perceptual salience (Taylor et al 1979, Smith & Miller 1979b, McArthur & Ginsberg 1981, Schwarz & Strack 1981, priming (Ferguson & Wells 1980), and set (Yarkin et al 1981) can be interpreted with reference to hypothesis generation and sampling mechanisms (McArthur 1980). Miller & Porter (1980) and Moore et al (1979) provide an intriguing riddle in that their research on the effects of temporal distance on attribu tion to the person or the situation has reached almost opposite conclusions using similar research methods. Both groups favor interpretations of their respective fi ndings that can be expressed in terms of hypothesis generation or sampling processes.…”

Current Issues in Attribution Theory and Research

“…Another interesting line of work on attribution-memory links has been carried out by Moore et al (1979), who identified a "dispositional shift" in memory for causation. These investigators found that when asked to explain an action in which they had just engaged, subjects interpreted it in terms of situational demands [consistent with Jones & Nisbett's (1972) actor-observer hypothesis] .…”