Control motivation and attributions for performance

Two experiments examined the relationship between the desire for effective control over performance outcomes and attributions of causality for those outcomes. In Experiment 1, subjects were led to believe that they had either succeeded at or failed a test that was either unimportant or important. As predicted, failure of the important test was attributed more to lack of effort (a controllable cause) and less to lack of ability (an uncontrollable cause) than was failure of the unimportant test. In Experiment 2, all subjects were led to believe that they had failed a test. Once again, subjects were informed that the test was either important or unimportant. In addition, half the subjects were told that they would be undergoing more tests in a later testing session, while half were not informed of any future testing. As in Experiment 1, subjects failing the important test attributed their failure less to lack of ability than did subjects failing the unimportant test. The anticipation of future testing interacted with test importance in its effects on attributions to ability. Subjects performing the unimportant task attributed their failure more to lack of ability when anticipating future performance than when not. Attributions of subjects performing an important task were not affected by the anticipation of future performance. Results were discussed in terms of the need for control over performance outcomes.     

When experiences of failure promote expectations of success: The impact of attribution failure to ineffective strategies1

This experiment examined the effects of attributing initial failure to ineffective strategies on performance expectancies. Subjects were induced to attribute performance at a persuasion task to either their strategies (a controllable factor) or abilities (an uncontrollable factor). Subjects then failed at their initial persuasion attempt. Following failure, strategy subjects expected more successes in future attempts than did ability subjects. Strategy subjects also expected to improve with practice, while ability subjects did not. Comparisons to control subjects, who received no attribution manipulation prior to success or failure, clarify these results. Findings suggest that subjects attributing task outcomes to strategies monitored the effectiveness of their strategies and concluded that by modifying their strategies they would become more successful. In contrast, subjects attributing task outcome to abilities failed to attend to strategic features and concluded that they could not improve. Implications of this overlooked factor for attribution theory and learned helplessness are discussed.     

The relationship of time investment and task outcome to causal attributions and self-esteem1

This study examined the relationship between performance outcome, time spent working at a task, and attributions to ability versus effort. It also explored differences in performance time as a function of self-esteem and task-performance expectancies. Subjects worked on a series of concept-attainment items and then were given either success or failure feedback regarding their performance and also information that they had worked either faster or slower than other subjects. They then evaluated their performance and that of a fictitious subject who had also purportedly done the task. Subjects attributed their own and other subjects' successes more to ability if they spent less time at the task and failure outcomes more to ability if they had spent more time at the task. Attributions to success and failure outcomes differed as a function of the interactive effect of self-esteem and task-specific expectancies. Low self-esteem subjects tended to attribute expected outcomes more to ability and unexpected outcomes more to effort, whereas high self-esteem subjects attributed successes more to ability and failure more to effort. Practice time and criteria for satisfaction were also a joint function of self-esteem and task-performance expectancy. The results suggest that task-performance expectancies must be considered when evaluating the role of self-esteem in determining people's responses in performance situations.     

Effects of induced success/failure and attributions on the problem-solving behavior of psychologically androgynous and feminine women

The aim of the present study was to examine the relation between masculinity and femininity in women and their responses to induced success or failure. Also experimentally manipulated were the subjects' performance attributions. Psychologically androgynous and feminine women either succeeded or failed at a concept formation task and were provided with internal, external, or no causal attributions for their performance. Then a second concept formation task was administered. The attribution manipulation failed to affect task performance and was not involved in any interactions. For feminine subjects, failure increased the trials necessary to reach criterion on the second task, whereas success had no effect. In contrast, the performance of androgynous subjects was unaffected by failure but facilitated by success. Finally, whereas androgynous subjects attributed success primarily to their ability and failure to task difficulty, feminine subjects attributed success and failure about equally to these two factors. It was suggested that androgynous women's use of the “egotistical” pattern of performance attributions gives them an advantage over feminine women with respect to the maintenance of self-esteem.     

Affect as a mediator of attributional egotism

A three-stage model of the relationships among achievement outcomes, outcome-related affect, attribution, and emotion is tested in two studies. It is suggested that success and failure elicit positive and negative affective states due to prior conditioning. These affective states then lead to an attribution process that serves to defend and enhance self-esteem. Next, emotional labels are chosen that are consistent with the affective states and the attributions. Two studies were designed to test the proposed relationships among achievement outcomes, affective states, and attributions. In the first study, subjects received information indicating that they were strongly or mildly aroused as a result of receiving outcome feedback on an achievement task. The results indicated that low arousal reduced egotistical attributions to internal factors. In the second study, subjects either succeeded or failed on an achievement task. Half of the subjects were provided with an opportunity to misattribute the arousal elicited by their outcomes to an irrelevant source. Subjects in the misattribution condition made less egotistical attributions to external factors than subjects who were given no opportunity to misattribute their arousal. The results of both studies suggest that outcome-related affect mediates the relationship between outcomes and attributions in achievement situations.     

Overt expression of experimenter expectancies,interaction with subject expectancies,and performance on a psychomotor task

Subsequent to success or failure experience, 48 subjects attempted a psychomotor task in order to escape or avoid an aversive stimulus (tone). Their attempts at solving the task over 24 trials were made in the presence of subject-experimenters each of whom had expectancies instilled regarding the solution to the task. The job of the subject-experimenters was to “offer information” on every third trials as the subjects attempted to solve the task. It was hypothesized that the expectancies of the subject-experimenters would be communicated to the subjects via periodic comments, that these expectancies would differentially affect the subjects' performance on the task, and that prior experience on a similar task would differentially affect subjects' performances on the task. The results demonstrated that the expectancies instilled in the subject-experimenters were communicated and influenced the performances of subjects as predicted. It appears that consistency with respect to the expectancies communicated played a major role in producing significant effects. Prior experience failed to produce significant differences on task performance, a finding conflicting with that of D.S. Hiroto (Journal of Experimental Psychology, 1974, 102, 187–193). The results are discussed from the perspective of using the overt, explicit communication of expectancies as a means for exploring the illusive phenomenon of the experimenter expectancy effect.     

Causal attributions as a function of locus of control, initial confidence, and performance outcomes.

Causal attributions and body movements indicative of tension were recorded while subjects completed an anagrams task that was more extensive than most similar tasks used in attribution studies. Nine trials each containing 10 anagrams were presented such that most subjects succeeded on three sets of relatively simple anagrams, failed on three sets of difficult anagrams, and either succeeded or failed on three sets of intermediately difficult anagrams. Attributions and body movements were predicted by a combination of locus of control, initial confidence, and type of outcome. High-confident internals attributed responsibility for outcomes to themselves more than did low-confident externals, and this difference was most prominent when subjects failed. Tension-indicating body movements were also less common among the former than the latter subjects and were in greater evidence with failure than with success. The data indicate that there is consistency between locus of control and causal attributions obtained during performances. The data also correspond to the findings on helplessness in which aversive agents prove to be more deleterious when individuals perceive themselves as unable to alter their negative circumstances.     

The effects of explaining hypothetical future events: From possibility to probability to actuality and beyond

Past research has demonstrated the effects of explaining hypothetical events on estimates of the probability that these events will occur. Two experiments examined the effects of explaining hypothetical outcomes for oneself on actual behavior in that situation and in a related situation. Subjects first explained hypothetical success or failure on an upcoming anagram task. They then either stated explicit expectations for the anagram task or did not. When subjects were asked to state expectations, those who had explained hypothetical success not only expected to do better but also actually outperformed those who had explained failure. That is, the events explained were behaviorally confirmed. However, when explicit expectations were not made following the explanation, those who had first explained failure did best of all, suggesting that raising the possibility of failure without forming concrete failure expectancies motivates better performance. Experiment II demonstrated that the self-fulfilling effects of prior explanation and expectation statements generalize to situations similar but not identical to the event that was explained. In addition, the effects of initial explanation predominated over the effects of actual performance feedback. The processes underlying these effects as well as the implications of the effects were discussed.     

Sex differences in attributions for sex-typed tasks1

Recent studies have indicated that males make more egotistical attributions than females, that is, males make more internal attributions for success and more external attributions for failure than females do. These sex differences in attributions were examined in terms of male/female differences in expectancies for success and ego-involvement in the tasks. Male and female subjects succeeded or failed on a masculine or a feminine task. It was found that males made more egotistical attributions than females on the masculine task, but females made more egotistical attributions than males on the feminine task. A covariance analysis revealed that these sex differences in attributions could be explained in terms of the differences between the males and females in expectancy for success and in ego-involvement. Finally, it was found that ego-involvement was a more important determinant of egotisical attributions in the present study than was expectancy.     

The effect of cognitive testing and feedback on older adults’ subjective age

Subjective age, or how old a person feels, is an important measure of self-perception that is associated with consequential cognitive and health outcomes. Recent research suggests that subjective age is affected by certain situations, including cognitive testing contexts. The current study examined whether cognitive testing and positive performance feedback affect subjective age and subsequent cognitive performance. Older adults took a series of neuropsychological and cognitive tests and subjective age was measured at various time points. Participants also either received positive or no feedback on an initial cognitive task, an analogies task. Results showed that participants felt older over the course of the testing session, particularly after taking a working memory test, relative to baseline. Positive feedback did not significantly mitigate this subjective aging effect. Results suggest that subjective age is malleable and that it can be affected by standard cognitive and neuropsychological test conditions.     

Duration of failure,causal attributions for failure,and subsequent reactions

Subjects were given a preliminary problem solving task of either short or long duration, and were told that they could shorten the duration of aversive noise bursts by correctly solving the problems. They were then given false feedback that they had done either well or poorly on the problems. Two groups of failing subjects were given information designed to lead them to attribute failure to either lack of ability or a difficult task. Two additional groups received “success” or “failure” feedback without any attributional cues. Failure-induced stress was reported to be greater under short duration conditions than under long duration conditions, and increased to the extent that subjects were led to believe they were personally responsible for failure. Following the preliminary failure period, task performance in the same situation and task performance and persistence in a different situation were assessed. In each case, performance and persistence decreased (a) following short-duration failure when subjects were led to attribute failure to a difficult task, and (b) following long-duration failure when subjects were led to attribute failure to lack of ability. These results are discussed within a framework that emphasizes the role of casual attributions in mediating the effects of failure.     

Testing the Assumptions of Attribution Theory in India

Abstract

Although numerous studies have investigated Weiner's (Weiner et al., 1971) attribution theory, little of this work has been conducted outside the West. Thus, the cultural boundaries of the theory have not been well established. In the present research, the basic tenets of the theory were tested in a conservative Asian Indian setting by examining the patterns of causal attributions, task evaluations, affective responses, and predictions for future performance among Asian Indian students when task outcomes were similar or discrepant with initial expectancies. Patterns of sex differences were also examined. The results showed that high expectancy individuals attributed their success more than their failure to ability and were less outcome contingent in their affective and cognitive reactions to their performance than lower expectancy groups. Indian women held slightly lower generalized expectancies than Indian men and attributed outcomes less to ability if initial performance expectancies were not high. The general pattern of results showed that Weiner's theoretical model was quite generalizable to the non-Western Asian setting.     

Social comparison after success and failure: Biased search for information consistent with a self-serving conclusion

Based on the traditional and attributional perspectives on social comparison, it was hypothesized that the search for social comparison information after performance outcomes is biased so as to provide evidence consistent with a favorable self-evaluation. In Experiment 1, subjects were led to believe that they obtained 16 or 8 out of 20 items correct on a bogus social sensitivity test and were then led to expect that most other students performed either well or poorly on the test. They were then given the opportunity to inspect up to 50 scored answer sheets from previous subjects. Consistent with the hypothesis, failure subjects requested more information when they expected it to reveal that most students performed poorly than when they expected it to reveal that most students performed well; success subjects showed little interest in this additional information, regardless of their expectancies as to what it would reveal. Experiment 2 employed a different approach to manipulating performance outcomes and led subjects to expect that most other subjects performed better, the same, or worse than themselves. Regardless of their own performance, subjects showed the least interest in additional information in the higher score expectancy condition and the most interest in additional information in the lower score expectancy condition. The role that this information search bias may play in producing self-serving attributions for success and failure and maintaining positive self-evaluations was discussed.     

Self-assessment,self-enhancement,and task preference

If task choice depends on a person's interest in the accurate assessment of his or her abilities, task attractiveness should be positively related to the diagnosticities of all performance outcomes with regard to one's ability level. In contrast, the view that people are primarily interested in maximizing pride or mininizing shame would predict that task attractiveness is positively related to the diagnosticity of success but negatively related to the diagnosticity of failure. To test these predictions, subjects were presented with tasks that varied orthogonally in the extent to which success was diagnostic of high ability level and the extent to which failure was diagnostic of low ability level. Consistent with the self-assessment view, task attractiveness increased both with the diagnosticity of success and with the diagnosticity of failure. Furthermore, both effects were more pronounced for high achievement motive subjects than for low achievement motive subjects. This result lends support to the self-assessment view, which assumes that high achievement motive subjects are more interested in attaining the ability-relevant information contained in any performance outcome.     

Unattainable Goal Choice as a Self-Handicapping Strategy1

Selection of an extremely difficult performance goal is conceptualized as a self-handicapping strategy–an attempt to externalize outcomes threatening one's self-image. In a laboratory study, male college students were led to believe they had succeeded at a task that was either relevant or irrelevant to their self-images. In conjunction with this, subjects were led to believe that the success they had experienced was either contingent upon or not contingent upon their effort. Consistent with a self-handicapping strategy, extremely difficult performance goals were selected on a subsequent task when success at a previous task was not contingent upon workers' e]ffort, but only in the personally relevant condition-i.e., when task performance had attributional implications for workers' s]elf-images. Personally irrelevant tasks led to a realistic downward revision of performance aspirations in response to noncontingent success.     

Category width and expectancies: Risk conservatism or generalization?

To compare interpretations of category width as an equivalence range and as a risk-taking dimension, an experiment by Phares and Davis (1966) was replicated and extended to examine the effects of unexpected failure and success on expectations for subsequent task performance. High scoring subjects on Pettigrew's (1958) Category Width Scale showed less generalization of expectancy following success and greater generalization following unexpected failure. A measure of similarity between tasks failed to differentiate from narrow categorizers and suggests that broad categorizers may adopt more conservative expectancies following unexpected outcomes of any favorability.     

Influence of personal and universal failure on the subsequent performance of persons with type A and type B behavior patterns

We conducted this experiment to compare the task performance of Type A and Type B persons following failure on a task in which no one succeeded (universal failure) versus failure on a task in which others had succeeded (personal failure). Postfailure performance was measured in terms of speed of completion of anagrams. Initial analyses indicated that the failure manipulation was effective in influencing the subjects' perceived cause of their failures, and that subjects were more anxious and depressed following personal failure than universal failure. More important, we found that Type A subjects performed better following personal rather than universal failure, whereas type of failure had no effect on the performance of Type B subjects. The results suggest that contrary to what is usually thought, Type A persons do not struggle for success indiscriminately. The results are discussed in terms of need for control and self-esteem.     

Effects of performance expectancies created by peer comparison as related to social reinforcement,task difficulty,and age of child

Children in kindergarten-first grades and fourth-sixth grades (6 and 10 years of age, respectively) participated in one of two experiments and performed either a simple motor task or (for older children only) a two-choice simultaneous discrimination task at two difficulty levels. Children received either positive, negative, or no peer comparison statements (describing how other children their age had allegedly performed) and either praise, silence (in Experiment 2 only), or criticism on a fixed-interval 20-second schedule throughout the task. Young children were more responsive to adult evaluation of their performance than to peer comparison. Expectancies created by peer comparisons affected older children's motor performance most if they received reinforcement contrary to the expectancy. In situations requiring greater cognitive ability, older children, particularly boys, responded to the performance expectancies created by positive peer comparison. Older boys, compared with older girls, seemed to be more sensitive to peer comparison and social reinforcement.     

Causal attributions for success and failure in relation to expectations of success based upon selective or manipulative control

Subjects worked at a 10-item Anagrams Test. In a manipulative control condition the prior performance of subjects on a set of practice anagrams was controlled so that half of these subjects began the test with high expectations of success and half with low expectations of success As a check on the manipulation, subjects provided ratings of how confident they were that they could pass the test (i e, solve five anagrams or more) In a selective control condition subjects were not given practice items but were subsequently assigned to high versus low expectation groups on the basis of their confidence ratings The difficulty level of the items in the Anagrams Test was manipulated so that half the subjects in each condition passed the test and half failed. Subsequently all subjects were required to rate the degree to which they considered ability (or lack of ability), effort (or lack of effort), task difficulty (easy or hard), and luck (good or bad) were causes of their performance outcome (success or failure). It was found that the expected success was attributed more to ability and less to good luck than was the unexpected success The expected failure was attributed more to lack of ability and less to bad luck than was the unexpected failure There was a greater tendency for subjects to appeal to task difficulty and effort as causes of their performance when they succeeded than when they failed. These results were discussed in terms of a structural balance model of attribution behavior and also in relation to Heider's naive analysis of the causes of action