Human agency and associative learning: Pavlovian principles govern social process in causal relationship detection.
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.
Department of Psychology, California State University, San Bernardino 92407, USA. rcramer@csusb.edu
Robert Ervin
RE
Cramer
Robert Frank
RF
Weiss
Robin
R
William
Suzanne
S
Reid
Lia
L
Nieri
Barbara
B
Manning-Ryan
D000328:Adult; D001245:Association Learning; D003214:Conditioning, Classical; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D011897:Random Allocation