The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology Section B · 2002 · 22 citations · 91 references
Causal Relationship DetectionBehavioral Decision MakingAssociative LearningSocial ProcessSocial PsychologyAffective NeuroscienceSocial InfluenceOrganizational BehaviorCausal InferencePsychologySocial SciencesCausal Relation ExtractionEmployee AttitudeCausal RelationshipBiasCr AcquisitionSocial Learning TheoryCompany Production InformationPublic HealthCognitive ScienceBehavioral SciencesApplied Social PsychologyCausal ReasoningExperimental PsychologySocial CognitionSocial BehaviorAttribution TheoryCausality
Estimates of a worker's causal relationship (CR) to production obeyed associative principles, despite the participants' a priori beliefs that workers are responsible or "at cause" for production. In three experiments, social analogues of conditioned stimuli (workers) and unconditioned stimuli (company production information) were manipulated in familiar Pavlovian paradigms. The findings included (1) CR acquisition, (2) unconditioned stimulus-intensity effects, and (3) CR blocking. The research plan employed an approach that Neal Miller (1959) termed "extension of liberalized S-R theory" and drew on the Rescorla-Wagner model to integrate the experimental results, to illuminate the empirical data of social attribution research, and to guide the study of causal relationship detection using social stimuli.
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