Attributional perspectives on academic judgments

Abstract

Since the 1940s (see Heider, 1944, 1958), the concept oi attribution is a key term insocial psychology that has stimulated intensive research in several directions (Gilbert, 1998;Kelley & Michela, 1980), Two major trends of research can be identified. The first comprisesstudies that focused on the perceived causes of others' or of one's own behavior. Thesestudies examined causal inferences people use to explain others' (hetero-attribution) or theirown behavior (self-attribution); what infonnation about an event are used by a perceiver (selfor others) to infer a cause (Heider, 1958; Jones & Davis, 1965; Kelley, 1967), In the secondline of research, studies investigated the consequences of attributing an event to differentcauses. The questions raised in these studies are how the attributions influence our feelingsabout past events, our expectations about the future, our attitudes, our behaviors and ourconceptions of ourselves, but also how they can affect the perception, the judgment and thereaction of other persons about us. Among the various distinctions of causal attribution madeby researchers (intentionality, globality, etc), the most popular is arguably the internal-external dimension. The success of this distinction emerged with Rotter's binary classification(1966) which permits to classify persons into one of the two profiles on the basis of their locusof control - opposing intemal persons to extemal persons. In this perspective, the aim of locusof control studies is not to investigate the mechanism of explaining behavior and emotionalstates of individuals (antecedent of attributions): rather, it eoncems the level of the causalrelationship that people set up between their own behavior or personal characteristics and thereinforcement or outcome received (positive and negative). This dichotomy became thestarting point for most of the locus of control studies that investigated the relationship betweena subject's locus of control and his/her performance or success (e,g,, professional, academic)and his/her well-being (see Findley & Cooper, 1983; Furnham & Steele, 1993; O'Brien,1984), In the attributional theory field, the argument on the dichotomous I-E distinction hasbeen enriched, very early on, by researchers such as Weiner et al, (see Weiner, Frieze, Kukla,Reed, Rest, & Rosenbaum, 1972; Weiner, 1979, 1985) who proposed the idea that secondand third dimensions of causality could be required: controllability (controllable vs.uncontrollable), and stability (stable v,$, unstable). Nowadays, a large set of empirical studiessupport the conclusions of Weiner's attribution theory of achievement motivation (Weiner,