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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Seeing The Forest And Not The Trees: When Impact Uncertainty Heightens Causal Complexity, Evelyn W. M. Au
Seeing The Forest And Not The Trees: When Impact Uncertainty Heightens Causal Complexity, Evelyn W. M. Au
Research Collection School of Social Sciences
This study attempts to isolate the effects of experiencing uncertainty on people's cognitive processes. I argue that people can believe that their actions affect the outcome (i.e. outcome control), but still face uncertainty regarding the extent to which actions will make a difference (i.e. impact uncertainty). To this end, I introduce a novel experimental paradigm which isolates the effects of impact uncertainty from outcome control. The findings revealed that after experiencing impact uncertainty, participants demonstrated greater causal complexity (i.e. more likely to make situational attributions and judge outcomes as having a “ripple effect”), but did not make fewer …
Moral Traps: When Self-Serving Attributions Backfire In Prosocial Behavior, Stephanie C. Lin, Julian J. Zlatev, Dale T. Miller
Moral Traps: When Self-Serving Attributions Backfire In Prosocial Behavior, Stephanie C. Lin, Julian J. Zlatev, Dale T. Miller
Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business
Two assumptions guide the current research. First, people's desire to see themselves as moral disposes them to make attributions that enhance or protect their moral self-image: When approached with a prosocial request, people are inclined to attribute their own noncompliance to external factors, while attributing their own compliance to internal factors. Second, these attributions can backfire when put to a material test. Studies 1 and 2 demonstrate that people who attribute their refusal of a prosocial request to an external factor (e.g., having an appointment), but then have that excuse removed, are more likely to engage in prosocial behavior than …