The Nature of Cause, the Role of Antecedent Conditions in Children's Attribution, andEmotional BehaviorAuthor(s): Michael LewisSource: Psychological Inquiry, Vol. 6, No. 4 (1995), pp. 305-307Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1448946 .

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COMMENTARIES

The Nature of Cause, the Role of Antecedent Conditions in Children's Attribution, and Emotional Behavior

Michael Lewis Department of Pediatrics

Institute for the Study of Child Development Robert Wood Johnson Medical School

University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey

The idea proposed by Dweck, Chiu, and Hong is both elegant and simple: They maintain that individual differences in implicit theories about the world affect people's judgments and reactions. It also should affect their emotional reactions (Lewis, 1992; Weiner, 1986). Dweck et al.'s claim fits well into Steven Pepper's (1942) World Hypotheses, the idea that certain over- arching beliefs are used to explain more specific theo- ries. In the developmental and personality literature, such notable theorists as Hayne Reese, Willis Overton, Richard Lerner, and Kenneth Gergen, among others, have maintained that in order to understand both exper- imental methodology and the interpretation of empiri- cal findings, it is necessary to understand the world view from which they come. I can find no objection to that claim. The idea that world view may be equally applicable to how individuals operate in their worlds is parsimonious with this belief.

In more specific terms, the problem that Dweck et al. set out to address is one that has influenced social psychology and personality theorists for some time. A review of the attributional theories is unnecessary because any interested reader can readily come upon them. The distinction that Dweck et al. draws-in- cremental versus entity world views account for a wide and diverse set of judgments and reactions- adds another dimension to attribution theory. They present convincing evidence for the association be- tween these two different types of attributions and between helpless versus mastery-oriented responses to personal setbacks as well as evidence on the retri- bution versus education perspective. I first briefly consider methodological issues. My concern is more on the issue of causality, and this receives most of my attention.

Dweck et al. concede that individuals do not have one attribution or another, but their attributions are situationally determined. Thus, a subject might have an incremental view in one context with an entity view for another. Now this is an interesting problem. Is it possi- ble that an incremental versus an entity view for a particular domain is determined by the way these attri- butions are measured? Is it possible, for example, that a subject might have both an entity and an incremental

view in the same domain if we measured them in some other way? The authors' argument that there are, within domains, stable individual characteristics is not yet convincing. But of a bit more concern, especially from a logical point of view, is the fact that Dweck et al. appear to be arguing that there is a trait-like attribution in people, even in people who do not have a trait-like attribution. Is it not true that a person who has an incremental view for a particular domain could be said to have a trait-like attribution? They attempt to get around this problem when they write that "these find- ings suggest that it is more appropriate to view implicit theories and their allied judgment and reaction patterns as relatively stable but malleable personality qualities, rather than as fixed dispositions." This statement sug- gests-although under some protestation-that Dweck et al., in fact, are entity theorists even though the entity that they are talking about is the likelihood of being an incremental theorist. This distinction between an individual's attribution and the consistency of that at- tribution needs resolution, and I hope that this problem can be dealt with.

My major concern, however, is with a more general problem: the issue of whether earlier behaviors affect later ones. Specifically, I wish to attend to the problem of causality. In several parts of the target article, Dweck et al. make clear that the attributional style of individ- uals determines their judgments and reactions. For ex- ample, Dweck et al. say that "an entity theory of personality and moral characterfosters trait judgments and trait attributions, whereas an incremental theory promotes a focus on more specific mediational pro- cesses." Moreover, they state that "these studies sug- gest that not only does an entity versus incremental theory of character predict a greater tendency to make trait judgments or attributions, it also predicts a prefer- ence for retribution versus education or remediation" [italics added]. These statements reflect causal con- nections between the attribution and subsequent judgments and reactions. As far as I can determine, the attributional literature in general makes this same causal relationship. This being so, this criticism from Dweck et al. applies equally well to all of us inter- ested in attributions. To what degree can we say that

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COMMENTARIES

these associations are causal? While I should not like to explore the Aristotelian idea of causes here-some- thing that we would all do well to reread-I do wish to point out that the use of the causal statement is some- what undeserved.

As I see the problem, the idea of association and cause has been confounded. Consider this example. We have in front of us a set of human behaviors including attributions, judgments, reactions, emotions, perfor- mance, and so forth-each of which is related to the others in some significant but modest way. There is an associative network, a connection between ideas, ac- tions, emotions, thoughts, and ideologies. If, on the one hand, we are attributional theorists, we tend to pull out the attribution and look at the associations between attributions and these other factors, making the claim that the attribution was the cause of the others. If, on the other hand, we are emotion theorists, we might pull out emotions and make the claim that attributions, judgments, and ideologies are the consequence of these emotions. In each case, the association between them remains the same. It is our own unique theoretical ideology that allows us to select one set as the cause of the other. Most attribution theorists are guilty of this error; associative connections are made into causal chains.

Problems related to development also involve the confusion of association and cause. Consider the case in which the associative net, rather than being obtained all at the same or relatively the same point in time, is obtained over a wide time interval. Again there is nothing more than an association, yet here too we make causal inference. The causal inference in this case is to assume that earlier events in some way cause later events. This logical error is called post hoc, ergo prop- ter hoc, and I have attempted to discuss this in more detail in Altering Fate: Developmental Models in So- cial Policy (Lewis, in press). The problems of causality are not easily dealt with in empirical science, and developmental psychology is no less guilty of it than are social and personality psychologies.

I certainly believe that attributions, in some sense, cause certain types of emotions. I have argued that the emotion of shame or pride is the consequence of attri- butions that involve beliefs about behavior vis a vis standards, responsibility for the action, and global ver- sus specific attribution about the self. Young children, if they make attributions that are internal and global about failures vis a vis tasks, are much more likely to show shame than if they do not make such attributions. In a series of studies (see Lewis, Alessandri, & Sullivan, 1992; Lewis, Chen, Sullivan, & Alessandri, 1995), we have been able to demonstrate a directionality that would fit nicely into Dweck's causal chain. Neverthe-

less, it is important to consider the possibilities that attributions themselves may be caused by factors such as emotion or temperament.

To explore this, I begin with a consideration of Csikszentmihalyi's (1990) idea of flow and the more general idea of the distribution of consciousness. Once we pass a certain age, human beings are capable of distributing their attention either toward themselves or toward a task or others. When it is distributed toward ourselves, we are said to be self-conscious. When we distribute it to others or to tasks, we have what we call task consciousness or orientation. We also know (see Csikszentmihalyi, 1975; Mandler, 1975) that there are particular situational determinants of how we distribute our attention; for example, once we complete a task or we have an interruption, we are likely to focus back on ourselves and become self-focused as opposed to task focused.

From our studies, there appear to be individual dif- ferences in the ability to focus on the task or on the self. Such individual differences may be dependent more on temperamental or dispositional factors than on any- thing having to do with attributions. Consider the adult deeply engrossed in writing a paper. She is task oriented and completely absorbed in what she is doing. She does not notice that many hours have gone by and that she has missed her usual lunch-time meal. While working on the task, quite suddenly, bodily information such as the emptying of the stomach or changes in blood sugar level finally impinge on and alter the direction of her attention. Rather than focusing on the task, the urgency of bodily activity, what we have called compelled in- trospection, pulls her toward thinking about her self. This movement of consciousness is initiated by infor- mation emanating from the body. Individual differ- ences in the ability to gate or inhibit information emanating from the body may be related to the degree of self-consciousness.

To follow this lead, we have conducted several studies (DiBiase & Lewis, in press; Lewis, 1994). In these studies, we observe very young infants, 2- to 6-month-olds, as they react to a standard inoculation procedure. We are able to distinguish between those children who show large responses to pain and those who show less of a response. We followed these children over the first 2 years of life and found that children who show high reaction to pain were likely to develop early self-recognition, a measure of what we have called self-referential or self-conscious be- havior. In addition, these children are more likely to show embarrassment when they become the focus of others' attention. These data suggest that biological, dispositional factors impact on individual differ- ences in children's self-focus.

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COMMENTARIES

These dispositional factors may affect children's ability to focus on themselves or on what they are doing. Moreover, this may be related to the children's attributions. Although socialization factors cannot be excluded and have been found to impact on children's attributions and emotions (Alessandri & Lewis, 1993), dispositional factors as well may affect attributions, which, in turn, affect emotional behavior. If this chain, under further study, proves to be the case, then the causal connections among attributions-ways of think- ing about things-and judgments, reactions, and emo- tions are more complexly related than we thought.

The way we think things work reflects the world views that we, as scientists, have. The idea of causality, either at one point in time or over time, is limited by these views. Which we choose to be the cause of the other is a function of our theories. This being the case, perhaps a more limited approach to the study of human behavior, including thoughts, feelings, and actions, is called for. As I have been struggling with this problem, I have come to the conclusion that we do not have sufficient information to argue for causal effects over time or causal effects within time. If, indeed, consis- tency of individuals or the relationship of cause over time or over situations cannot be demonstrated, then perhaps we must reconsider how we go about studying behavior. Here, Pepper's world view coincides with William James' (1890) contextualism and becomes particularly informative. What we may be able to demonstrate, especially idiographically, is the associa- tion of behavior-in-context. That association for indi- viduals, along with some simple principles about association of situations or behaviors, may lead us to a more satisfactory idea than our current notions of causality.

Note

Michael Lewis, Department of Pediatrics, Institute for the Study of Child Development, Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, 97 Paterson Street, New Brunswick, NJ 08903.

References

Alessandri, S. M., & Lewis, M. (1993). Parental evaluation and its relations to shame and pride in young children. Sex Roles, 29(5-6),335-343.

Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1975). Beyond boredom and anxiety: The experience of play in work and games. San Francisco: Jossey- Bass.

Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: The psychology of optimal expe- rience. New York: HarperCollins.

DiBiase, R., & Lewis, M. (in press). Temperament and emotional expression: A short-term longitudinal study. Infant Behavior and Development.

James, W. (1890). The principles of psychology. New York: Holt. Lewis, M. (1992). Shame, the exposed self. New York: Free Press. Lewis, M. (1994, June). Self and self-conscious emotions. Paper

presented at the International Conference for Infant Studies, Paris.

Lewis, M. (in press). Altering Fate: Developmental models in social policy. New York: Guilford.

Lewis, M., Alessandri, S. A., & Sullivan, M. W. (1992). Differences in shame and pride as a function of children's gender and task difficulties. Child Development, 63, 630-638.

Lewis, M., Chen, D., Sullivan, M. W., & Alessandri, S. A. (1995). The development of shame and pride: Age, sex, and attribution differences among children. Manuscript in preparation.

Mandler, G. (1975). Mind and emotion. New York: Wiley. Pepper, S. C. (1942). World hypotheses. Berkeley: University of

California Press. Weiner, B. (1986). An attributional theory of motivation and emotion.

New York: Springer-Verlag.

Entity and Incremental World Views: Some Lessons From Learned Helplessness Theory and Research

Christopher Peterson University of Michigan

In their target article, Dweck, Chiu, and Hong de- scribe their research program on the consequences of people's implicit theories about the fixedness versus malleability of human attributes. In a variety of studies, they support their central claim that entity theorists, who believe that attributes do not change, differ sensi-

bly from incremental theorists, who believe that attri- butes can and do change. As Dweck et al. point out, their work shares a family resemblance with other cognitive approaches, including learned helplessness (Peterson, Maier, & Seligman, 1993). In this commen- tary, I draw on helplessness theory and research to

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