• Who is to blame when a relationship breaks up?

  • Does an older person’s greater experience with life enable him or her to judge other people more accurately?

We employ a developmental perspective by asking whether older and younger adults answer questions such as these differently.

 

 

How do older and younger persons differ in their causal judgments?

Older adults tend to focus on the characteristics of a person rather than the situation surrounding an event, even more than younger adults do. This pattern, however, is not found for all situations or across cultures.

In scenarios that involve interpersonal relationships, older adults tend to attribute the causes of an undesirable outcome to a personal characteristic of an actor rather than situational pressures that may be present. For example, when a relationship breaks up, older adults are more likely than younger adults to blame the main character. In contrast, in achievement-oriented scenarios, there are no age-differences in dispositional attributions. This tendency to focus on the individual rather than the influence of the situation also extends to judgments people make about others’ beliefs and attitudes. For example, if a person is instructed to advocate a certain position in an essay, logically you cannot infer this person’s true attitude. Contrary to expectations, people tend to believe that the essay is reflective of the writer’s true attitude despite the situational constraint. Interestingly, this effect is even stronger in older adults.

Age differences in dispositional tendencies are not always found cross-culturally. In a study comparing American and Chinese adults we found that Chinese participants did not show age differences in dispositional tendencies whereas our Western participants did.

 

How can age differences in causal attributions be explained?

There is no simple explanation for why and how individuals change. Time and age per se do not explain why older persons are more likely to make dispositional causal attributions in certain contexts. Our research focuses on identifying psychological mechanisms that can account for age-related differences in causal attributions. Specifically, we investigate the role of cognitive mechanisms as well as the role of beliefs and values in explaining age differences in causal attributions.

Cognitive Mechanisms and Causal Attributions

Previous social psychological work on causal attributions has shown that limiting cognitive resources through parallel tasks increases the likelihood of dispositional inferences in younger adults. In general, older adults show lower performance on many standardized cognitive laboratory tasks, such as working memory tests, reasoning tests, and perceptual speed tests. Therefore, age differences in cognitive resources were investigated as one potential explanatory mechanism for age differences in causal attributions. Our research shows that cognitive functions such as verbal abilities, working memory, and perceptual speed indeed play a role in explaining age-differences in causal attributions. Older adults have, for instance, more difficulties with ignoring irrelevant or false information than younger adults do. On the other hand, our research shows that simple interventions, such as giving older adults more time to think about a social dilemma, decrease the tendency for dispositional inferences in older adults. Cognitive mechanisms are important in explaining age-related differences in causal attributions. They cannot, however, account for all age-related differences in dispositional inferences.

Beliefs, Schemas, and Causal Attributions

Some of the age differences in attributions may also be explained through social psychological mechanisms. This perspective assumes that older and younger adults have different beliefs, schemas, and experiences that lead them to have different views on situations in which they make attributions. For example, people may rely on their own beliefs on capital punishment when asked to judge another person’s attitude about that topic. Other factors that may account for age differences include styles of thinking such as intolerance for ambiguity and personal need for structure.

Several of our recent studies show that a person’s beliefs are a stronger predictor of dispositional attributions than age or indicators of cognitive functioning. For instance, people who hold strong traditional values were more likely to blame a character in a fictitious scenario who violated these beliefs.

Another recent study investigated the beliefs that people hold about the relationship between attitudes and behavior. We found that the degree to which an individual believes that it is difficult for people to act against their attitude partially accounts for his or her dispositional attributions of the target.

 

References

 

Blanchard-Fields, F. (1994). Age differences in causal attributions from an adult developmental perspective. Journals of Gerontology, 49, P43-P51.

 

Chen, Y., & Blanchard-Fields, F. (1997). Age differences in stages of attributional processes. Psychology & Aging, 12, 694-703.

Blanchard-Fields, F., Baldi, R., & Stein, R. (1999). Age relevance and context effects on attributions across the adult lifespan. International Journal of Behavioral Development, 23, 665-683.

Blanchard-Fields, F. (1996). Causal attributions across the adult life span: The influence of social schemas, life context, and specificity. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 10, 137-146.

Blanchard-Fields, F., & Norris, L. (1994).Causal attributions from adolescence through adulthood: Age differences, ego level, and generalized response style. Aging and Cognition, 1, 67-86.

Blanchard-Fields, F., Chen, Y., Schocke, M., & Hertzog, C. (1998). Evidence for content-specificity of causal attributions across the adult life span. Aging, Neuropsychology and Cognition, 5, 241-263.

Chen, Y., & Blanchard-Fields, F. (2000). Unwanted thought: Age differences in the correction of social judgments. Psychology & Aging, 15, 475-482.

Blanchard-Fields, F., & Horhota, M. (2005). Age differences in the correspondence bias: When a plausible explanation matters. Journals of Gerontology: Psychological Sciences, 60B, P259-P267.

Blanchard-Fields, F., & Horhota, M. (2006). How can the study of aging inform research on social cognition? Social Cognition, 24, 207-217.

Horhota, M., & Blanchard-Fields, F. (2006). Do beliefs and attributional complexity influence age differences in the correspondence bias? Social Cognition, 24, 310-337.

Mienaltowski, A., & Blanchard-Fields, F. (2005). The differential effects of mood on age differences in the correspondence bias. Psychology and Aging, 20, 589-600.

Blanchard-Fields, F., & Beatty, C. (2005). Age differences in blame attributions: The role of relationship outcome ambiguity and personal identification. Journals of Gerontology: Psychological Sciences and Social Sciences, 60B, P19-P26.

Blanchard-Fields, F. (2005). Introduction to the special section on emotion-cognition interactions and the aging mind. Psychology and Aging, 20, Special issue: Emotion-Cognition Interactions and the Aging Mind, 539-541.