Marcie’s best friend, who is usually kind, was just rude to Marcie. Marcie believes that her friend must be having a bad day. This judgment by Marcie about why her friend was rude to her is known as:

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Here is the scenario and the answer choices to analyze:
Question: Marcie’s best friend, who is usually kind, was just rude to Marcie. Marcie believes that her friend must be having a bad day. This judgment by Marcie about why her friend was rude to her is known as:
Answer options:
A. The self-fulfilling prophecy
B. A causal attribution
C. Superficial processing
D. The primacy effect

Option A: The self-fulfilling prophecy
- This option would apply if Marcie’s belief about her friend’s behavior caused future interactions to become more likely to confirm the belief. In this scenario, Marcie is not suggesting that her belief will cause her friend to act badly; rather, she is attributing the cause of the rude behavior to an external factor (a bad day). Therefore, this is not a correct fit.

Option B: A causal attribution
- This option fits the description. A causal attribution is the explanation one gives for why an event occurred, assigning a cause to another person’s behavior. Marcie attributes the rude behavior to her friend having a bad day, which is exactly attributing a cause to the action. This aligns with attribution theory’s idea of inferring causes for others’ actions.

Option C: Superficial processing
- Superficial processing refers to evaluating information with minimal cognitive effort, leading to quick, surface-level judgments. While Marcie’s reasoning could be considered a shallow inference in some contexts, the term asked for specifically describes assigning a cause to the behavior, not the depth of processing. This makes C an incorrect label for what the situation describes.

Option D: The primacy effect
- The primacy effect concerns the tendency to remember or be influenced more by information presented first in a sequence. It is about ordering effects on memory and judgment, not about explaining why someone acted a certain way. Therefore, this option does not capture the described attribution.

Summary: The scenario centers on explaining a person’s behavior by citing a cause (a bad day), which is precisely what a causal attribution means. The other options describe different social-cognitive phenomena that do not match the act of assigning a cause to the behavior.

PSYC20009_2025_SM2 Lecture 7 Quiz

Marcie’s best friend, who is usually kind, was just rude to Marcie. Marcie believes that her friend must be having a bad day. This judgment by Marcie about why her friend was rude to her is known as:

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