Winners' and Losers' Attributions for Success and Failure in a Series of Athletic Events

Boys who participated in a series of athletic events as part of their activities at an overnight camp evaluated the importance of possible causes for success and failure in these events. These reasons included the four traditional attributions of ability, effort, luck and task difficulty, and other attributions suggested in previous person-perception studies of the causes of outcomes in achievement-related tasks. The results indicated the following: (a) two of the traditional attributions (luck and difficulty) were perceived as having little importance, (b) success was attributed to internal factors whereas failure was attributed to external factors, (c) the differences between the winners and losers provided little evidence for the presence of a self-serving bias in their evaluations of the items, and (d) the differences between actors and observers were not entirely consistent with the hypothesis that actors attribute outcomes to situational factors and observers attribute the same outcomes to dispositional factors. These results are discussed in light of possible confounds in the experimental design and previous attribution research in sport.