Cultural differences in athlete attributions for success and failure: the sports pages revisited

Self‐serving biases in attribution, while found with relative consistency in research with Western samples, have rarely been found in Japanese samples typically recruited for research. However, research conducted with Japanese participants to date has tended to use forced‐choice and/or reactive paradigms, with school or university students, focusing mainly on academic performance or arbitrary and/or researcher‐selected tasks. This archival study explored whether self‐serving attributional biases would be shown in the real‐life attributions for sporting performance made by elite Olympic athletes from Japan and Australia. Attributions (N = 216) were extracted from the sports pages of Japanese and Australian newspapers and rated by Australian judges for locus and controllability. It was hypothesized that Australian, but not Japanese, athletes would show self‐serving biases such that they attributed wins to causes more internal and controllable than the causes to which they attributed losses. Contrary to predictions, self‐serving biases were shown to at least some extent by athletes of both nationalities. Both Australian and Japanese men attributed wins to causes more internal than those to which they attributed losses. Women, however, attributed wins and losses to causes that did not differ significantly in terms of locus. All athletes tended to attribute wins to causes that were more controllable than the causes to which losses were attributed. Results are inconsistent with a large body of research suggesting that Japanese do not show self‐serving biases in attribution, and are discussed in the light of differences in methodology, context, and participants that may have contributed to these effects.     

Effects of a rival's perceived motives on constructive competition within organizations: A competitive dynamics perspective

Previous work on constructive competition has focused on competitors' motives and strategies; however, competition is an interactive process that is affected by both the competitor and the rival. Based on the competitive dynamics perspective and attribution theory, this study examines the impact of a perceived rival's motives on the constructiveness of competition. The results of a survey of 521 employees from 25 companies in the banking and insurance industry in Taiwan revealed that the perceptions of rivals' motives significantly affected the constructiveness of competition. By introducing the perspective of rival analysis to individual‐level competition, the present study provides a more comprehensive understanding of constructive competition within organizations.     

Le « test par CDD » comme frein au fonctionnement des entreprises

In France, in order to evaluate job applicants, some employers use short term contract before recruiting on a long term contract. The present study aims to compare companies having this practice and others. More precisely, we will appreciate the level of recruitment difficulties and the degree of fundamental error of attribution according companies. Results indicate that companies having “test by CDD” have more recruitment difficulties and more fundamental error of attribution to explain these failures.     

Performance deficits following failure: Integrating motivational and functional aspects of learned helplessness

Abstract

This paper deals with the psychological processes that mediate between repeated, uncontrollable failure on one task and performance deficits on subsequent tasks. A model is presented that integrates Seligman's (1975) motivational and Kuhl's (1981) functional interpretation of performance deficits following failure. The central assumptions of this model were tested in a laboratory study with college students. In accordance with our model, repeated failure (1) increasingly led to task- and solution-irrelevant cognitive activities (state orientation, according to Kuhl) the more it was attributed to internal, stable, and global causes, and (2) led to an increment in effort the more it was attributed to unstable and specific causes. Furthermore, results indicated that the influence of failure on state orientation was partly mediated by the importance subjects attached to the failure, and that the performance on subsequent tasks was influenced by both the motivational (effort) and functional (state orientation) consequences of failure.     

The Antecedents of Retrieval Inhibition

The subjects were given one of three types of retrieval tests—free-recall, part-list cued-recall, or part-set cued-recall—in a modified directed-remembering study. A directed-remembering effect occurred for free-recall but not for cued-recall, and a blocking effect occurred with “remember” words but not with “forget” words. These results suggested that the same retrieval cues that initiate blocking may alter the impact of the directed-remembering effect.     

Hostile attribution bias's role in perceived stress among college freshman students: A latent growth modelling approach

This study's objective was to examine the growth trajectories of freshman students' perceived stress and whether hostile attribution bias predicts the pattern of perceived stress change using latent growth analyses. A longitudinal dataset with fourth measurement points was gathered from a total of 1109 college students enrolled at a university in Guizhou Province in the first 3 months after college freshmen enrollment. The freshman students' levels of perceived stress tend to show a piecewise linear decline during the transition period, which manifests as a faster decline in the first stage (within the first month) than in the second stage (after the first month). Moreover, hostile attribution bias not only positively predicted the initial level of perceived stress but also positively predicted the slope of perceived stress in the first and second stages. In addition, there was a significant sex difference in the initial level of perceived stress where the initial level of perceived stress was higher in females than in males, but there was no significant sex difference in the rate of perceived stress decline. These results highlight the longitudinal relationship between hostile attribution bias and perceived stress and have implications for improving freshmen' college adaptation.     

不同类型社会排斥中归因诱导对攻击性的影响

为探讨归因诱导能否缓解不同类型社会排斥引发的攻击性,研究分别采用网络任务范式和网络投球范式启动拒绝和放逐,进行不同的归因诱导后用科研助理评分范式测量攻击性。结果发现,放逐引发的攻击性比拒绝高;归因诱导对拒绝引发的攻击性有显著影响,对被拒绝者进行内部归因诱导后其攻击性显著低于外部归因诱导组和无归因诱导组;归因诱导对放逐引发的攻击性无显著影响。研究表明归因诱导对拒绝型直接排斥引发的攻击性有缓解作用。     

Feeling the ease: How the use of oral motor fluency changes in amnesia

The present study examined the evolution observed in amnesic patients’ use of motor fluency when making recognition memory decisions. In this experiment, 9 patients with amnesia and 18 matched controls were presented with two recognition memory tasks composed of 3 types of items: (1) natural words, (2) nonwords difficult to pronounce, and (3) nonwords easy to pronounce, the latter having been shown to be processed in a surprisingly fluent manner as long as participants can articulate them at a subvocal level (i.e., oral motor fluency). Our results provide evidence that the motor-movement manipulation was successful to induce a fluency effect. More specifically, data revealed that both amnesic patients and control participants showed a pattern of response consistent with the use of fluency as a cue to memory for studied items. However, only control participants relied on fluency to increase their rate of “yes” responses for unstudied items. These results suggest that patients with amnesia set a more conservative response criterion before relying on oral motor fluency, showing a pattern consistent with the idea that fluency is only used as a cue to memory when it exceeds a certain threshold. These findings are discussed in terms of adaptative metacognition strategies implemented by amnesic patients to reduce fluency-based memory errors as well as in terms of the variations that seem to occur in these strategies depending on the type of fluency that is experienced.     

Evangelical Elites’ Anti‐Homosexuality Narratives as a Resistance Strategy Against Attribution Effects

While attribution theory expects that beliefs about the origins of homosexuality are directly related to beliefs about the moral acceptability of homosexual behavior, we use content analysis of the popular evangelical magazine Christianity Today to show that evangelical elites have developed a series of anti‐homosexuality narratives that allow them to resist attribution effects. In particular, we find that even when evangelical elites have expressed belief in the physiological origins of homosexuality, such as the influence of genetics and/or prenatal hormones, their negative beliefs about the moral acceptability of homosexual behavior have not varied. We argue, then, that evangelical elites’ anti‐homosexuality narratives provide them with a strategy for influencing rank‐and‐file evangelicals, so that while allowing for a diversity of beliefs about the origins of homosexuality, rank‐and‐file evangelicals still have a viable mechanism for connecting these beliefs—whatever they may be—to negative beliefs about the moral acceptability of homosexual behavior. Our findings thus extend attribution theory, illuminate the potential power of moral narratives, and amplify the need for future research.