Effects of Admitting or Denying a Mistake
- 1 August 1986
- journal article
- research article
- Published by Taylor & Francis in The Journal of Social Psychology
- Vol. 126 (4), 531-537
- https://doi.org/10.1080/00224545.1986.9713621
Abstract
The study examined the attributional and attractional effects of admission or denial of a mistake in interaction with the stimulus person's status, the seriousness of the consequences of the mistake, and the certainty of the evidence. The factorial design of the experiment was 2 × 2 × 2 × 3 (Status x Consequences x Evidence x Admission). Male undergraduate college students in Bombay (N = 480) read a passage about a mislabeling incident in a pharmaceutical concern and then rated the stimulus person on several variables. Admission of the mistake elicited the most favorable ratings. The no-statement condition received slightly more negative evaluations than the denial condition. Higher status led to greater responsibility attribution, but seriousness of consequences did not. The most liked stimulus person was the high-status person who admitted his mistake in the condition of serious consequences and ambiguous evidence.This publication has 6 references indexed in Scilit:
- Sanctioning the High-Status Deviant: An Attributional AnalysisSocial Psychology Quarterly, 1983
- Who is Responsible? Toward a Social Psychology of Responsibility AttributionSocial Psychology, 1978
- Defensive attribution: Effects of severity and relevance on the responsibility assigned for an accident.Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1970
- 'Second Guessing' Important EventsHuman Relations, 1967
- Assignment of responsibility for an accident.Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1966
- Some Determinants and Consequences of the Perception of Social Causality1Journal of Personality, 1955