| Abstract | Two studies were conducted investigating the dispositional shift in attributions over time. In the first investigation, the phenomenon was replicated by a content analysis of attributions extracted from the autobiographies of 77 famous psychologists; attributions about early behaviors were more dispositional than were attributions about recent behaviors. In the second investigation, the role of memory in mediating the dispositional shift was studied by asking 15 undergraduates to write descriptions of events of varying distances in the past. Compared to accounts of recent events, accounts of past events contained fewer descriptions of a writer's spec for behaviors and reactions but there mention of dispositional traits, suggesting that a self-schema organized in terms of dispositions is created over time as memories for specific actions fade. Further supporting this conclusion was the finding that dispositional traits tended to be mentioned early in a description, reflecting a presumably salient role in memory. References to situational details decreased as the events described became more distant, and there was no evidence that a situation-schema representing abstract properties of the situation developed over time.
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