Fraud Beliefs Following the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election: A Belief Systems Analysis

Beliefs that the 2020 Presidential election was fraudulent are prevalent across the U.S. despite substantial contradictory evidence. We surveyed 1642 Americans during the U.S. Presidential vote count on November 4-5, assessing fraud beliefs and presenting hypothetical election outcomes before key states were decided. Participants’ fraud beliefs increased when their preferred candidate lost and decreased when he won, and this effect scaled with preference strength. A Bayesian model accounts for this bias as reflecting a rational attribution process operating on biased prior beliefs about the true election winner and beneficiary of fraud. Our findings suggest that a systems approach targeting multiple beliefs simultaneously may be more fruitful in combating false beliefs than direct “debunking” attempts.

Sex/Gender Attribution: When the Penis Makes the Difference

The present study aimed to replicate Kessler and McKenna’s (1978) ethnomethodological study that investigated how an individual attributes gender to a person. By administering figures depicted on overlays (Overlay Study), Kessler and McKenna found that the penis more than the vulva and the male sexual characteristics more than the female ones were significantly more salient in the gender attribution process. From all this, their adage is: “See someone as female only when you cannot see them as male.” Taking as a model Kessler and McKenna’s Overlay Study, we administered to 592 adults 120 new digital stimuli elaborated on realistic frontal images of human nudes to verify if the previously obtained results would be confirmed by using more realistic images. We found that the participants attributed male gender 86% of the time when the penis was shown, but only attributed female gender 67% of the time when the vulva was shown. All findings had strong statistical significance, confirming the findings of the Overlay Study that the penis makes the difference in gender recognition. Beyond an ethnomethodological approach, we have interpreted and discussed our results from the outlook of evolutionary and cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience, concluding that the cultural stereotypes and prejudices that affect gender attribution might not just be a mere cultural product, but rather the consequence of evolved cognitive biases.

Attributing Inferred Causes and Explanations to Behavior

Behavior is a reflection of the intentions, attitudes, goals, beliefs, and desires of a person. These intra-individual factors are coordinated with what opportunities the situation affords and the perceived constraints placed on the person by their context and the norms of the culture they are in. Further, the intentions, attitudes, goals, beliefs, and desires of a person are often not known to them in any given moment, and because they reside within the mind of that person they are almost always not known to the people who are perceiving that person. To know anything about other people we must observe and identify/classify their behavior and then attribute to the observed behavior inferences and judgments about the internal states of that person serving as the motivating force behind their behavior. This entry explores this process of attribution. Heider described attribution as the process that determines “how one person thinks and feels about another person, how he perceives him and what he does to him, what he expects him to do or think, how he reacts to the actions of the other.” The entry explores the rules that people follow in order to make sense of behavior, and the rational versus non-rational nature of the procedure. Even when highly motivated to think rationally, this process can be biased, and flaws can appear in the attribution process, such as from chronic differences among perceivers due to culture, experience, or personality. How the process would unfold if accurate and purely rational is contrasted with how it unfolds when biased. How we feel, and how we choose to act, are derived from how we make sense of the world. Thus, attribution processes are foundational for understanding how we feel, for establishing expectations, and planning how to act in turn.

Revisiting Attribution Theory: Toward a Critical Feminist Approach for Understanding Attributions of Blame

Heeding the necessary call for interpersonal communication research to be theorized and conducted from a more critical perspective, we employ feminist standpoint theory as a critical tool for reading attribution theory. Specifically, we examine social positionality as an essential aspect of the attribution process and identify how oppressive power structures (macro-level) and a critical consciousness of one’s social positionality (micro-level) impact interpersonal interactions (meso-level). Key components of our approach are visualized and applied to the context of sexual violence, and suggestions for additional interpersonal contexts to consider and ways to further the discussion are addressed. Overall, we maintain that taking a non-neutral, critical feminist approach to attribution theory enables us to consider how perspectives of marginalized groups are valuable sources of knowledge, interrogate how social positionality for those in power may impact attributions of blame, and recognize how groups in the margins have the agency to enact social change.

THE INFLUENCE OF PERCEPTION AND ATTRIBUTION ON THE FORMATION OF ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOR

The article analyzes the features of the influence of perception and attribution on the formation of organizational behavior. The environment has an important influence on human life, organization, set of organizational conditions of labor joint activity of people. Social perception is a complex set of phenomena and processes that ensure the orientation of a person in the surrounding social space, which provide him with a state of readiness for action. The content of the concepts of "perception" and "attribution", as well as related categories are characterized. The peculiarities of selection and organization of the environment, which includes search, retrieval and processing of information, are also considered. The main elements of the process of perception from the first observation to the last response to the following elements are analyzed: the influence of the environment, observation, selection of perception, organization of perception, interpretation, response. The influence of external and internal factors on organizational behavior, the correctness of the manager's understanding of the business situation is revealed. Systematized external factors of perception on certain grounds, as well as aspects of internal factors that affect the selection of perception (personality, learning, motivation). Personal perception is characterized by the peculiarity of influencing how a person perceives other people. Such manifestations of employees have an impact on organizational behavior. In the course of the research the influence of attribution of perception is argued, which is characterized by the way of understanding the reasons of organizational behavior of other people. The basic model of the attribution process is also considered, which helps the employee to assess existing events, to predict the possible consequences of future events or behavior. The actions of employees, their successes and failures, people tend to explain situational attribution, and their successes and failures of others – personal attribution. Employees make assumptions about the success or failure of tasks that are important for organizational behavior. That is, attribution indicates how people explain the reasons for their own behavior and the behavior of others.

Decision Support System for Assigning Members to Agile Teams

The use of agile methodologies like SCRUM is seen by companies in the software engineering field as a strategic necessity for their competitiveness, which makes them more reactive and dynamic in an increasingly demanding and competitive international market. One of the critical factors in the implementation of a SCRUM environment is the set-up of teams that are simultaneously homogeneous and composed of the best collaborators for each SCRUM role. In this sense, this study describes the modeling process and presents the implementation of a decision support system that can contribute to improving the process of assigning an agile team simultaneously considering the technical and social skills of employees. The results of the study allowed testing the application considering different competencies associated to each Agile position, the impact that the attribution process suffers from oscillations in the process of evaluation and self-evaluation, and the impact in terms of the performance of the inclusion of new collaborators and criteria comparison.

Th e Eff ect of Attribution on Athlete Scandals: Consumer Responses toward Scandalized Athletes and Endorsements

The purpose of the current study, drawing on attribution theory, was to investigate consumers’ attribution process and its impact on their responses to a scandalized athlete and endorsement. The results of the experiment indicate that the distinctiveness of an athlete scandal prompts external attribution while having a negative impact on internal attribution. Additionally, the consistency of an athlete scandal triggers internal attribution. Moreover, the results show that internal (external) attribution has direct negative (positive) impact on attitude toward the scandalized athlete. Lastly, the results show that consumers’ attribution type indirectly determines the consumer responses toward the troubled athlete and endorsement perception. Findings of the current study provide empirical evidence to explain what informational cues consumers utilize when making causal inferences and how such causal inferences subsequently affect the consumer responses. Th e current study also provides marketing managers with useful implications to make informed decisions in the athlete transgression context.

Improving automatic data extraction from financial statements with clustering analysis

The financial statement analysis is a fundamental part of the credit risk attribution process, producing documents that are valuable sources of information about companies’ economic and financial wealth. Large volumes of that type of document demand automatic data extraction, and locators drive the tools for that task. However, due to the lack of regulation, there is not a standard layout for such documents, which originates a variety of document structures. Such variety burdens the feature extraction tools, reducing their performance. Clustering analysis overcomes such burden by finding the best document clusters, allowing the development of fine-tuned locators for each cluster based on their main characteristics, which is the main objective of this work. We applied state-of-the-art clustering techniques, RNG-HDBSCAN*, FOSC and MustaCHE, over financial statements documents to assess their clusters and main structures, separate outliers, and analyze their main features. The result allows the specialists to define proper locators for each cluster, increasing the performance of the data extraction tools.

Cyber Attribution: Technical and Legal Approaches and Challenges

Considering the role of attribution in the law of state responsibility, this article examines the technical and international law methodologies and determinants used when attributing malicious cyber activities falling below the use-of-force threshold to a state, and identifies the challenges that arise which lead to responsibility gaps. The article goes on to discuss a number of proposals that aim to improve the effectiveness of the attribution process and also close some of the existing responsibility gaps. They include institutional proposals envisaging the creation of an international attribution agency; normative proposals advocating the revision of the legal determinants of attribution; and proposals concerning the standard of proof. The aim of the article is to reconstruct the theory and practice of cyber attribution in order to enhance the regulatory potential of international law in this area.

Attacker Behaviour Forecasting Using Methods of Intelligent Data Analysis: A Comparative Review and Prospects

Early detection of the security incidents and correct forecasting of the attack development is the basis for the efficient and timely response to cyber threats. The development of the attack depends on future steps available to the attackers, their goals, and their motivation—that is, the attacker “profile” that defines the malefactor behaviour in the system. Usually, the “attacker profile” is a set of attacker’s attributes—both inner such as motives and skills, and external such as existing financial support and tools used. The definition of the attacker’s profile allows determining the type of the malefactor and the complexity of the countermeasures, and may significantly simplify the attacker attribution process when investigating security incidents. The goal of the paper is to analyze existing techniques of the attacker’s behaviour, the attacker’ profile specifications, and their application for the forecasting of the attack future steps. The implemented analysis allowed outlining the main advantages and limitations of the approaches to attack forecasting and attacker’s profile constructing, existing challenges, and prospects in the area. The approach for attack forecasting implementation is suggested that specifies further research steps and is the basis for the development of an attacker behaviour forecasting technique.