Augmentation, Single Causation, Discounting, and minimum Causation in Attributions

Abstract

Research designed to demonstrate the attributional principles of augmentation, discounting, and minimum causation (a known cause and possible cause schema) has provided inconsistent findings. Because these inconsistencies may have been due to methodological differences, research was designed to examine the use of all three principles (along with single causation) within a single framework, employing a measure of attributional certainty. Attributional certainty was found to be significantly greater under augmentation than under single causation which, directionally, was significantly greater than attributional certainty under discounting. The finding of attributional certainty under minimum causation as being not significantly different from that under single causation was, perhaps, due to subjects' psychological restructuring of the task.