Attitudes, Values, and Attributions: Explanations of unemployment.

Two studies demonstrate statistically reliable correlations between attribution measures and the attitudes and values that people hold. Subjects in both studies rated 27 explanations of unemployment in regard to their importance as causes of youth unemployment, and subscales were derived on the basis of a factor analysis. In Study 1, scores on these subscales were consistently related in the predicted direction to both general conservatism assessed by the Wilson and Patterson (1968)Conservatism Scale and to conservative voting preference for a sample of 265 university students. In Study 2, scores on the derived scales were related in the predicted direction to the relative importance of some of the terminal and instrumental values from Form D of the Rokeach Value Survey (Rokeach, 1973) for a sample of 334 high-school students. The results also indicated a number of sex differences and social class differences in the variables that were assessed. The major findings support the assumption that causal attributions for events are not simply the products of neutral information processing, but are linked to the cognitive-affective system.