Affect as a determinant of egotism: Residual excitation and performance attributions.

An experiment was conducted to investigate the influence of outcome-related affect on subsequent causal attributions. After working on a social skills test, college students engaged in a physical exercise task. The students were given success or failure feedback on the social skills test either 1, 5, or 9 minutes after the exercise. Excitation transfer theory suggests that the residual arousal from the exercise in the 5-minute condition may elevate the positive and negative affective states elicited by the success and failure feedback. Thus, increased attributional egotism in the 5-minute condition was predicted. The principal findings are as follows: (a) Subjects preferred internal factors to explain success, whereas external factors were blamed for failure, and (b) ego-defensive attributions following failure and ego-enhancing attributions following success were more pronounced in the 5-minute condition than in the 1-minute and 9-minute conditions. The results support the idea that outcome-related affect mediates egotistical performance attributions. A firmly established finding in the recent social psychology literature is the phenom-enon of asymmetrical attributions after suc-cess and failure. People tend to attribute suc-cess to their efforts, abilities, or other dis-positions, whereas they attribute failure to bad luck, task difficulty, or other external variables. The earliest results hinting at this pattern stem from studies that analyzed at-tributions for performance outcomes involv-ing teaching tasks (Beckman, 1970; Johnson, Feigenbaum, & Weiby, 1964). Since then, numerous other studies have replicated this finding using a variety of different paradigms