Attribution Theory: Explaining Success and Failure

1Same mark, different futures

Two S6 students, Ineza and Gatete, both score 38 out of 100 in a mock Mathematics examination. Ineza says: "I'm just not a maths person; I never will be." Gatete says: "I revised the wrong topics and started too late. Next time I'll start in week one and practise past papers."

Which of them is more likely to improve by the national examination? Most people guess Gatete, and attribution theory explains why. What matters is not only what happened, but the cause each person believes produced it.

21. The roots: people as "naive scientists"

Fritz Heider (1958) argued that ordinary people act like naive scientists, trying to explain events so that the world becomes predictable. His key distinction was between internal and external causes. Harold Kelley (1967) then asked how people decide between them, and proposed that we look at three kinds of information:

High consensus, high distinctiveness and high consistency point to an external cause (the comedian is funny); low consensus, low distinctiveness and high consistency point to an internal cause (Mutesi laughs easily).

32. Weiner's attribution theory of achievement

Bernard Weiner (from 1972 onwards) applied attribution to success and failure in school, sport and work. He noted that people usually explain achievement by four causes, ability, effort, task difficulty and luck, and that what matters is where each cause sits on three dimensions:

• Locus: is the cause inside the person (internal) or outside (external)?
• Stability: is the cause fixed over time (stable) or changeable (unstable)?
• Controllability: can the person control it (controllable) or not (uncontrollable)?

Why the dimensions matter

Ineza blames an internal, stable, uncontrollable cause, so she expects to fail again and may give up. Gatete blames internal, unstable, controllable causes (effort and strategy), so he has a reason to keep working. This idea underlies attributional retraining: teaching students to explain setbacks by effort and strategy. Studies with first-year university students have found modest improvements in grades and persistence after such training.

Controllability also explains part of stigma. When people wrongly believe that an illness, including a mental illness, is the sufferer's own fault, they feel less sympathy and offer less help. Accurate information that such conditions are not chosen tends to reduce blame.

43. Errors and biases in attribution

• Fundamental attribution error (Lee Ross, 1977): over-emphasising internal causes and under-emphasising the situation when explaining other people's behaviour. In Edward Jones and Victor Harris's (1967) study, American students read essays praising or attacking Fidel Castro. Even when told the writer had been assigned a side, they still judged that the essay showed the writer's true opinion.
• Self-serving bias: taking credit for success (internal) and blaming failure on the situation (external). It protects self-esteem and appears in many cultures, though it is weaker in some East Asian samples.
• Actor-observer bias (Jones and Nisbett, 1971): explaining our own actions by the situation but others' by their dispositions. A large review by Bertram Malle (2006) found this difference is much smaller and less consistent than once believed, so treat it with caution.
• Culture: Joan Miller (1984) found that Hindu Indian adults explained everyday behaviour more by the situation and Americans more by disposition, and Michael Morris and Kaiping Peng (1994) found the same contrast between Chinese-language and English-language newspaper reports of the same murders. The "fundamental" error is therefore not equally fundamental everywhere.