EFFECTS OF PUBLIC ESTEEM ON CAUSAL ATTRIBUTION FOR SUCCESS AND FAILURE

Abstract

The present studies were conducted to investigate the effects of public esteem on causal attribution for one's own success and failure. In Experiment I, Ss were forty-four female university students. Success-failure was manipulated by false feedback after Ss performed the task of anagrams. Public esteem with two levels was manipulated by different situations; in high public esteem (HPE) condition, Ss were asked to answer personally to an evaluator about attribution, while in low public esteem (LPE) condition, asked to fill out the attribution questionnaire in his absence. After receiving success or failure feedback, Ss were asked to attribute their own success or failure to the following four factors, ability, effort, task difficulty, and luck. Attribution was measured by the method of paired comparison of these factors.Experiment II was conducted outside the laboratory in an actual achievement situation. After an examination of educational psychology was given with 169 university students, thirty good a hievers and thirty poor achievers were chosen as success and failure group, respectively. HPE condition, furthermore, was manipulated by two significance levels of evaluator; in one condition, an evaluator was an instructor of educational psychology, and in the other, was a freshman of psychology course. LPE condition was the same as in Experiment I, though manipulated not individually but simultaniously throughout Ss.Main results were as follows:1. As predicted, Ss under LPE condition attributed their own success to internal factors and their own failure to external factors. Ss under HPE condition attributed their own success to external factors more than did Ss under LPE condition, and their own failure to internal factors more than did Ss under LPE condition. The broadened self-serving bias formulation, proposed by Bradley (1978), was supported.2. Difference between two levels of significance of evaluator had no significant effects on self-serving attribution.