The effect of severity, consistency, and typicalness information on clinicians' causal attributions

Abstract

Sixty-four clinicians responded to a brief description of a depressed student by indicating the extent to which each of four possible causes contributed to the depression. The descriptions were varied systematically so that the student's depression was described as either mild or severe, typical or atypical, and as having occurred before or as never having occurred before. Results indicated greater attribution of the depression to internal causal factors when the individual's depression was described as atypical and greater attribution to stable causal factors when the depression was described as having occurred previously. When the depression was described as severe, the clinicians tended to attribute it to external unstable causes. It was suggested that clinicians may differ from other populations in some of the causal attributions that they make for psychological difficulties.