The Perceived Causal Structure of Unemployment

Abstract

there have been a number of studies of divergence in social perception of the causes of various economic phenomena / differences between supporters of the major British political parties have been found in terms of the salience of causal categories / conservative supporters emphasize individualistic causes whereas labour supporters focus on societal causes / this research assumes that people across political affiliations basically share the same category system for the causes and differ in terms of which categories are salient an alternative approach to social perception has been developed based on perceived causal structures / a method based on sociometry has been developed to obtain representations of causes as implicit causal models a study of divergence in social preception as difference in perceived causal structure shows that people with different political affiliations have implicit causal structures which vary in complexity and direction of causality / implications of these results for theories of social perception and attribution are considered (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (chapter)