How to promote social approval: Effects of audience and achievement outcome on publicly communicated attributions.

Students' understanding of attributional self-presentation strategies that facilitate adults' and peers' social approval in achievement situations was examined. In Experiment 1, 8th-grade students were asked to predict how success and failure due to ability (high vs. low) and effort (high vs. low) would affect peer popularity and teacher liking. Students recognized that attributions elicit different responses depending on their audience and achievement outcome. In Experiment 2, the same participants rated the likelihood of communicating 4 attributions (ability, effort, exam fairness, and luck) as a reason of their own imagined exam performance to peers, teachers, and parents