Work by Blanchard-Fields has consistently found that older adults are prone to making dispositional inferences in certain contexts (Blanchard-Fields, 1994; 1996; 1999); however mechanisms underlying these tendencies have yet to be explored. The present study assessed the influence that personal belief has on attitude attributions made by both young and older adults. Using the attitude-attribution paradigm, participants made judgments about a targets actual attitude based on an essay that was written by the target. The essay contained a position on a controversial social issue, i.e. prayer in public school, that the target was instructed to advocate. Replicating past research, older adults rated the targets attitude to be more strongly consistent with the content of the essay than young adults did. Personal beliefs did not have a large effect on attitude attributions, however age and belief related differences appeared in both confidence ratings and as a function of attributional complexity. Fluid reasoning was also found to have an impact on attributions.

According to terror management theory, awareness of death affects diverse aspects of human thought and behavior. Studies have shown that older and younger adults differ in how they respond to reminders of their mortality. The present study investigated one hypothesized explanation for these findings: Age-related differences in the tendency to make correspondent inferences. The correspondence bias was assessed in younger and older samples after death-related, negative, or neutral primes. Younger adults displayed increased correspondent inferences following mortality primes, whereas older adults' inferences were not affected by the reminder of death. As in prior research, age differences were evident in control conditions; however, age differences were eliminated in the death condition. Results support the existence of age-related differences in responses to mortality, with only younger adults displaying increased reliance on simplistic information structuring after a death reminder.

The evolutionary forces that led to the unprecedented expansion of the human brain and the extreme cognitive prowess possessed by humans have always attracted a great deal of attention from the scientific community. Presented here is a novel theoretical perspective, where the driving force on human brain evolution was the need for enhanced ability to infer social values of conspecifics in the face of degradation and loss of chemosensory signalling mechanisms necessary for social communication present in most mammals. The lack of chemosensory communication of biologically relevant information between humans in the face of the need to make adaptive and accurate social evaluations, led to an exaption of mammalian chemosensory brain regions for the more complex task of inferring social values from behavioural cues that are variable, ambiguous, or otherwise difficult to detect and interpret. This change in social processing from perceptual evaluation to inferential computation placed a premium on cognitive capacity, thus selecting for larger more powerful brains. These selective processes would have left an indelible mark on the human brain, where the human homologues of regions involved in mammalian conspecific chemical communication, in particular the target regions of this study the amygdala and ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPC), should be involved in the processing of biologically relevant information and social inference. Several experiments were conducted to examine the role of these brain regions in social inferential processing using the lesion deficit method. First, given that conspecific chemical communication is particularly relevant for biologically imperative evaluation for the purposes of reproduction, VMPC and amygdala damage may result in abnormal mate-related decisions. Second, normal social attributions exhibit the correspondence bias, however damage to the target regions may result in an abnormal lack correspondence bias. Third, the current hypothesis is contrasted with another leading hypothesis, the Social Brain Hypothesis whose proponents predict a relationship between group-size and social cognition. Finally, if the target brain regions are truly integral in inferring social information, then damage to these regions will interfere with the ability to utilize transitive inference in social situations, and potentially in using transitive inference in general. Damage to the target areas produces limited effects on mate-related decisions and preferences. However, the current hypothesis may suggest that the target brain regions are only involved when the problem is inferential in nature rather than simpler perception of social information. In support of this notion, damage to the target regions results in a lack of the correspondence bias when making economic decisions. This alteration in social attributions actually leads to more `rational' decision-making in this context. In contrast to the predictions of the Social Brain Hypothesis, damage to the target regions produces no observed reduction in social group size, nor is there any observed relationship between perspective-taking ability and group size. Finally, damage to the VMPC produces deficits in using transitive inference in a non-social context perhaps hinting at the underlying computations of this region in inferring social information. In conclusion, it appears that the notion that the human brain regions that have been exapted from their duties in chemosensation and communication in mammalian brains has at least some validity. Moreover, these brain regions have been shifted by evolution to a more computationally complex process of social inference possibly providing the push toward larger and more powerful human brains.

<p>Enkäter används flitigt idag. Spector (1994) menade att endast en liten del av den förklarade variansen i enkäter utgörs av det som önskas mäta. Bryggan mellan respondenten och enkäten är språket. Enligt Whorf-Safir hypotesen styrs våra tankar av språket. Semin och Fiedler (1988) menade att ordklasserna har olika abstraktionsnivåer. Desto högre abstraktionsnivå ju mer rör den sig bort från kontexten resulterande i stereotyptänkande (Gilbert & Malone, 1995). Denna studie undersökte hur olika ordklasser påverkar svar. Huvudstudien var utformad som ett personlighetstest med påståenden. Resultatet uppvisade en skillnad mellan svaren då påståendena innehöll substantiv eller adjektiv. Respondenterna tenderade att instämma mindre då ordet var ett substantiv, något som förklarades med correspondence bias. Resultatet bekräftade tidigare studier. Replikering med engelsk enkät efterlystes.</p>

Enkäter används flitigt idag. Spector (1994) menade att endast en liten del av den förklarade variansen i enkäter utgörs av det som önskas mäta. Bryggan mellan respondenten och enkäten är språket. Enligt Whorf-Safir hypotesen styrs våra tankar av språket. Semin och Fiedler (1988) menade att ordklasserna har olika abstraktionsnivåer. Desto högre abstraktionsnivå ju mer rör den sig bort från kontexten resulterande i stereotyptänkande (Gilbert &amp; Malone, 1995). Denna studie undersökte hur olika ordklasser påverkar svar. Huvudstudien var utformad som ett personlighetstest med påståenden. Resultatet uppvisade en skillnad mellan svaren då påståendena innehöll substantiv eller adjektiv. Respondenterna tenderade att instämma mindre då ordet var ett substantiv, något som förklarades med correspondence bias. Resultatet bekräftade tidigare studier. Replikering med engelsk enkät efterlystes.

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Constituents in the judicial process such as jurors and lawyers who often play a critical role in the aftermath of an alleged financial reporting fraud have largely been ignored in the accounting literature. Literature in psychology suggests that both laypeople and highly trained professionals frequently over-attribute causality of an observed behavior to the disposition of the person performing that behavior. In doing so, these individuals underestimate the power of situations and fail to recognize important environmental factors that lead to a particular behavior. Within the context of fraudulent financial reporting, there is little understanding of how jurors and lawyers initially perceive and react to fraudulent behavior. Consequently, it is possible jurors and lawyers who are asked to evaluate the causality of a suspected fraudulent event, are inaccurate in their assessment of the causality of that event. This study addresses the question of whether or not the various constituents in the judicial process are biased in their attributions when evaluating causal factors related to financial reporting decisions. More specifically, it focuses on how individuals outside the profession of accounting, laymen jurors and corporate lawyers, make attributions when observing decisions related to fraudulent financial reporting, and whether or not these attributions differ from those made by corporate accountants. Further, after identifying differences in attributions, this study attempts to determine the causes of these differences; and whether recent changes in business culture have been effective in curbing financial reporting fraud. The late 1990s and early 2000s saw a proliferation of high profile financial reporting frauds, and as a result, numerous changes have been made within the regulatory environment governing financial reporting. Many of these changes targeted overall business culture and a commitment to ethical financial reporting. By studying the attributions of corporate accountants we learn about their perceptions of the current environment and better understand their willingness to report something in a manner that would constitute financial reporting fraud. Evidence demonstrates that laymen, corporate lawyers, and corporate accountants differ in their attributions and that laymen are typically more biased when observing individuals and their financial reporting decisions. Laymen are also shown to lack awareness of recent changes in the financial reporting environment, have unrealistic expectations of the likelihood accountants are willing to intentionally misreport something, and are not as good at identifying appropriate and inappropriate financial reporting behaviors. Results also suggest recent changes in business culture and governance around financial reporting have been effective in convincing corporate accountants that environmental factors should not lead to, and are not a viable excuse for, fraudulent financial reporting. / Ph. D.

Although age-related differences in the correspondence bias are often attributed to cognitive decline, the present study found that age-related differences in the correspondence bias were differentially influenced by the participants mood states. Young and older participants completed an attitude-attribution task after having been induced to experience a positive, neutral, or negative mood. Whereas older adults demonstrated the correspondence bias more strongly in the negative mood condition relative to the positive mood condition, young adults exhibited the exact opposite pattern of results. Interestingly, the positive mood manipulation led older adults to be no more dispositionally biased than their younger counterparts. Further, mood and age-related differences in attributional confidence were not eliminated after controlling for individual differences in cognitive functioning.