Dimensional and Categorical Attributions in Expert Parole Decisions

Social psychologists and cognitive psychologists have recently argued that human judgment is based on content-rich and context-bound knowledge structures such as schemas, prototypes, and scripts rather than criterial attributes of categories or universally-applicable dimensions. We argue that causal attributions should be treated as an aspect of content-specific schemas or categories rather than as points in a content-free dimensional framework. Analyses of judgments by expert parole decision makers indicate that a categorical coding of causal attributions is significantly more predictive of willingness to grant parole, prognoses for rehabilitation, and risk of future crime than is a dimensional coding. Further, these categorical attributions are more strongly predicted by case information than are ratings on attributional dimensions. The advantages of considering attribution processes within more general theories of human judgment are discussed.