Education and Causal Attributions: The Development of "Person-Blame" and "System-Blame" Ideology

Two studies tested predictions derived from a theory proposing that judgments about the causes of a social problem do not merely reflect various motivational or cognitive biases but result from socialization in a particular culture. In the first study, university students in the social sciences were found to attribute more importance to situational factors and less importance to dispositional factors than did social science students at earlier levels of education and students in other areas at all levels. In a second study, the causal attributions of poor and unemployed youth of various ages were compared to those of social science students of similar ages. Contrary to what might be predicted by the actor-observer model or the research on attributions for success and failure, the unemployed sample blamed the poor and the unemployed significantly more than did the social science students. The results of these studies are consistent with a cultural interpretation of attributional diversity and support the argument for a greater social orientation to theories of attributional processes.