Immediate attributional effects of success and failure in the field: Testing some laboratory hypotheses

Investigated how team success and failure are attributed to dispositional and situational factors as a function of immediate outcome of the group performance, past success of the team, and individual performance of team members within the group. 150 Little League baseball players' attributions for the team's outcome were taken separately with regard to team- and self-factors immediately after the conclusion of a game. The results reveal that success, independent of the margin of victory, is primarily assigned to effort and ability, while clear-loss is attributed to both effort and task difficulty. Conversely, bare-loss is seen to be mainly due to task difficulty and secondarily to low effort. The results are interpreted as supporting the notion of ego-centered causal judgments, but not necessarily the motive to enhance one's self, on the basis of the new proposition that effort has a different attributional meaning in the cases of success and failure; when losing effort is treated as an external factor, and when winning, effort tends to be interpreted as an internal factor. No differences with respect to attributions exist between individual players who perform poorly and those who excell within the team performance.