Boundary Conditions for Self-serving Attributions: Another Look at the Sports Pages1

Attributions (N =.310) by professional athletes were extracted from newspapers, and coded along the dimensions of locus, stability, controllability, and globality. Findings confirmed the existence of self-serving attributional biases, but showed these to be limited in extenthtensity by personal (ability and experience level) and situational (team vs. solo sport) factors. Losses were ascribed to external and wins to internal causes among athletes of low experience, high ability, and/or engaged in solo sports-but not under other circumstances. A similar pattern of results emerged only on the controllability dimension. Beyond indicating boundary conditions to the bias, results suggested that it might not even be “self-serving”, or hedonistic, in nature. Difficulties in this type of research, and possible improvements, are discussed.