Attributional Shifts Among the Bereaved and Their Implications for Public Policy: Exploring Social and Psychological Factors

The coping behaviors of the orphans after the loss of independence are to a large extent directly affected by the individual's attribution of the loss of independence. Under the influence of comparative cognition at the individual level, assimilation of the concept of self-organization at the group level, and social exclusion encountered in the process of reintegration into society, the attributions of the separated people for the loss of independence differed greatly at different stages after the loss of independence, in the face of different interactions with different people, and in different psychological and living conditions, and on the whole, there was a tendency to evolve from self-attributions to attributions to family planning policies, which triggered a shift from self-redemption actions to collective rights defense actions by the separated people, creating potential collective action risks. This has led to a change in the mode of action from self-redemption to collective rights defense, creating a potential risk of collective action. Therefore, through defining the government's rights and obligations towards the lost children, giving full play to the positive guiding role of the lost children's organizations, and encouraging the lost children's self-redemption, reconstructing the positive attributional cognition of the lost children is an important direction for the governance of China's lost children at the present time.