Abstract

Recently, the debates on the corporal punishment is a very hot issue in the field of school, and there have been constant arguments between pros and cons of the corporal punishment. But the views and the logics on the corporal punishment are quite different between teachers and students. The attribution theories can explain this difference with the concept, actor-observer bias. Students who made a fault may not see the self-behavior, but concentrate on the background information, especially teacher's variable because of their viewpoint. But teachers who conducted the corporal punishment concentrate on the student's fault and ignore the situations that the students experienced. The present study investigated how the attributions of the corporal punishment were influenced by the background information. The following hypothesis was formulated. "If the background information is equalized, students will attribute toward their faults". In order to test this hypothesis, Kelly's(1967) three kinds of attribution information(distinctiveness, consensus, consistency information) were manipulated. And based on the manipulation, five scenarios were prepared, which are often occurred in school. Then the scenarios were given to two groups of high-school students. While one group was given a scenario that only one teather(high distinctiveness) punishes some students(low consensus), only at this time(low consistency), the other group was given a scenario that all teachers(low distinctiveness) always(high consistency) punish most students(high consensus). As a result of this, it was confirmed that students attributed toward their faults when the background information of teacher was equalized in the four scenarios. The results supported the hypothesis.