Causal explanation and attitude change: new predictors.

Summary This work is part of the problem of predicting attitude change following submissive behavior from the registers (internal and external) of causal attribution. Our initial hypothesis was to expect a greater change in attitude in subjects who explained their submissive behavior internally than in subjects who explained their behavior externally. Seven experimental studies were carried out on a population of students. The first results show that the variable "causal attribution" affects the cognitive effects of a submissive behavior if one takes into account, not the internal or external nature of the attributions, but the possibility given or not to explain the submissive behavior and the degree of agreement expressed towards these causal explanations: subjects who justify their behavior (i. The subjects who justify their behavior (i.e., who adhere to internal or external causal explanations) change their attitude more than the subjects who do not have this possibility, and this, all the more so as they express a high degree of agreement towards these explanations. We also observe that subjects who justify their submissive behavior change their attitude more than subjects who counter-justify it (i.e., who agree with reasons that could explain the refusal to perform this behavior). We then hypothesized that the effects of causal attribution registers on attitude change could be mediated by the variable "justification versus counter-justification of the submission behavior." The last results, treated by the lisrel method, show that the internal register positively affects attitude change, its effects being mediated by the effects of the variable justification, and that the external register negatively affects attitude change, its effects being mediated by the effects of the variable counter-justification of the submission behavior.