Attributions and Performance: The Effects of Sex Role Identity and Sex-Typed Tasks

Abstract

Abstract American female college students (N = 59) filled out the Bem (1974) Sex Role Identity Scale and completed an anagram task with subsequent random success or failure feedback. Half of the students were told that males do very well on the task. The other half of the students were told that females do very well on the task. Students then filled out scales attributing the success or failure to each of the four major attributions—ability, effort, task ease or difficulty, and luck. Data were also collected on expectations for the same task again in the future, and affect. Results supported the hypothesis that nontraditional women would have a more self-enhancing pattern of attributions than feminine sex-typed women. Feminine sex-typed women attributed success more often than nontraditional women to having an easy task, and they performed significantly less well on the task. An inhibition was more apparent in the masculine task condition, suggesting that the lowered performance may be due to the sex role inappropriateness of the task. All students had higher future expectation for the same task when the task had been defined as a masculine one. Feminine sex-typed students saw outcomes on the masculine tasks as due more often to luck than did nontraditional women in an interaction effect. This was explained in terms of the perceived sex role inappropriateness of this task for these women and less past experience with masculine tasks.