Poverty Attributions and Emotions Associated With Willingness to Help and Government Aid

This study aims to understand how willingness to help people in poverty and the agreement with providing government aid are connected to emotions and attributional processes, in a country with a high poverty rate such as Argentina. Differences in poverty attributions and emotions among self-reported social class are also analysed. A total sample of 331 secondary-school students completed self-administered questionnaires. Correlations and regression analyses showed that, whereas emotions such as compassion, empathy and pity seem to motivate helping behaviours, explanations as to the cause of poverty, rather than emotions, are closely associated with an agreement to providing government aid. However, low levels of anger seem to be required to endorse both helping behaviours and agreement to providing government aid. On the other hand, respondents who self-identify as belonging to upper classes report more anger and use fewer structural explanations to understand poverty than lower-classes respondents. We propose that future research analyse a greater variety of helping behaviours towards people in poverty and types of government intervention in the global south.

How Often Have You Felt Disadvantaged? Explaining Perceived Discrimination

Based on longitudinal data from Germany, we analyze how perceptions of discrimination change once migrants’ integration evolves. Individuals who identify more strongly with the host country, speak the language, have native friends, and are adequately employed report less discrimination overall. However, group-specific analyses reveal that German-born Turks feel more rather than less discriminated against after their language skills and their identification increase. For this group, we find evidence for the “integration paradox”, i.e., the finding that better educated migrants have more rather than less negative attitudes about the host society. Results suggest that attributional processes rather than rising exposure to discrimination might be the main mechanism linking integration to higher levels of perceived discrimination. Obviously, discrimination does not disappear for groups facing salient ethnic boundaries and is met with growing awareness and sensitivity among individuals that have become more similar to the majority of members. This, in turn, by no means implies that perceived discrimination is detached from reality.

Validation of a Set of Stimuli to Investigate the Effect of Attributional Processes on Social Motivation in Within-Subject Experiments

Attribution of responsibility for the causes of suffering is one of the main factors that influence responses to individuals in distress. While the role of attributional processes on prosocial motivation has been widely investigated in social psychology, only few attempts have been made to characterize their behavioural and neurophysiological underpinnings. This is partly due to the lack of stimuli that can facilitate within-subject experimental designs. To overcome this problem, we created a set of stimuli consisting of videos depicting people in different situations of distress. Each video is paired with short stories that aim to manipulate the perceived degree of responsibility of the main character. To validate the stimuli, we investigated the effect of different context-video pairs on self-report measures of participants’ subjective experience. We found that different contexts preceding the same video can influence blame and responsibility judgments, affective responses and willingness to help. In a complementary analysis, we replicated previous findings on the influence of empathy and responsibility on willingness to help, showing how the latter is mediated by moral judgments. Finally, we observed a general increase in responses times when videos were paired with responsible contexts. We provide interpretations of this finding that can relate attribution accounts to prominent theories in moral psychology. Overall, this study highlights the possibility of expanding existing theories on prosocial motivation by implementing a set of stimuli that includes multiple scenarios and allows for the collection of third person measures in within-subject designs.

Attribution and attributional processes of organizations’ environmental messages

This experimental study, guided by attribution theory, investigated the impact of the substantiation and specificity of organizations’ environmental messages on perceived communication motivation and how this perception prompts audiences’ affective and cognitive responses. Findings showed that specific messages increased perceived intrinsic motivation, whereas vague messages increased perceived extrinsic motivation; in turn, perceived intrinsic motive positively influenced audiences’ message attitude, organization attitude, message credibility, organization credibility, and organization’s green image, whereas perceived extrinsic motive negatively influenced these aspects.

Indicators of Criminal Justification or Repentance in a Qualitative Analysis of Inmates Autobiographical Criminal Self–Narratives

This study explores the narrative contents obtained from the description of autobiographical memories reported by a sample of incarcerated males that exemplified their most aggressive, transgressive, or criminal selves. Participants were 110 men serving a prison sentence for different types of crimes. Three main phenomena were identified from their stories: the narration of the criminal self, description of the crime (or crimes) committed, and the criminal responsibility attributional processes. The results showed the existence of mechanisms to justify the crime among a large section of participants, whereas the assumption of personal responsibility for the commission of the crime and the consideration of an unfair or excessive sentence were not as frequent. Also, some specific crimes concurred with concrete responsibility attributional processes, especially with the justification of criminal behavior. These findings generate useful information regarding recidivism, resocialization, and the attribution of responsibility among inmates.

Validation of a set of stimuli to investigate the effect of attributional processes on social motivation in within-subject experiments

Attribution of responsibility for the causes of suffering is one of the main factors that influence responses to individuals in distress. While the role of attributional processes on prosocial motivation has been widely investigated in social psychology, only few attempts have been made to characterize their behavioural and neurophysiological underpinnings. This is partly due to the lack of stimuli that can facilitate within-subject experimental designs. To overcome this problem, we created a set of stimuli consisting of videos depicting people in different situations of distress. Each video is paired with short stories that aim to manipulate the perceived degree of responsibility of the main character.To validate the stimuli, we investigated the effect of different context-video pairs on self-report measures of participants’ subjective experience. We found that different contexts preceding the same video can influence blame and responsibility judgments, affective responses and willingness to help.In a complementary analysis, we replicated previous findings on the influence of empathy and responsibility on willingness to help. However, we did not observe a negative correlation between responsibility and empathy as described in attribution theories.Finally, we observed a general increase in responses times when videos were paired with Responsible contexts. We provide interpretations of this finding that can relate attribution accounts to prominent theories in moral psychology.Overall, this study highlights the possibility of falsifying existing theories on attributional processes by implementing a set of stimuli that includes multiple scenarios and allow for the collection of third person measures in within-subject designs.

ATTITUDE AND PURCHASE INTENTION TOWARDS TEMPE PRODUCERS JOINING THE PROTESTS A Study in Central Java

The theory of attribution has been widely used in marketing studies. However, this theory contains some limitations as well. Using the context of protests of tempe producers, this study aims at minimizing the limitations by integrating the attribution theory with collective action theories, prosocial theories, and expectancy-value theories in explaining and predicting the behavior of product consumers and individuals/groups that joined the protests. To answer the research objectives, this study proposed a model integrating the attribution of perceived motives of tempe producers joining the, empathy towards tempe producers, attitude towards tempe producers, and subsequent purchasing intention. The results indicate that the proposed model is supported by the data. This implies that the integration of the attribution theory with collective action theories, prosocial theories, and expectancy-value theories can minimize the limitations with regard to the criticism in neglecting motivation in attribution processes and confounding between attribution processes and attributional processes.