Explanations and impressions: Investigating attributions and their effects on judgments for friends and strangers

Abstract

This paper investigated differences between private and public explanations for failure events and also studied the effects of public explanations on impressions by friends and strangers. Multiple Regression analysis found that strangers whose public explanations for failure events had less stable causes were judged as more appropriate and effective and their explanations were seen as more coherent as compared to those whose explanations reflected more stable causes. Friends were judged as having more accurate explanations when their public explanations included external rather than internal causes. Only friends, however, seemed to strategic to encourage more positive impressions (i.e., their private explanations reflected more personal responsibility and internal causes than did their public explanations). Strangers' private explanations were more external and showed less personal responsibility than the explanations they provided to others, despite the potential consequences of the attributions they communicated to others. These results suggest that future research should focus on interaction goals that may explain the difference between how people present their failures to strangers as compared to those who are friends.