PSY 355 Week 4 Attributions, Expectations and Inference Example

Luck, Ability or Effort? Attributions and Expectations Behind a Failed Statistics Quiz

[Student Name]

University of Phoenix

PSY/355: Motivational Processes in Human Psychology

Week 4 Assignment

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

The people described are composites written for a model paper; research findings come from the sources listed.

After any important outcome, people ask why. The answer they give, the attribution, shapes how they feel, what they expect next time and whether they try again. Expectations, in turn, can shape outcomes. This paper applies attribution theory and research on expectations to a returning adult student's reaction to a failed quiz.

The Situation

Malik, the working father and online psychology student followed since Week 1, scored 58 percent on his first statistics quiz. In a group chat, a classmate, Priya, mentioned she had scored 92. Malik's reaction was immediate: "I knew it. I'm just not built for this. She's a natural." He felt ashamed, skipped the next study session and began reading about withdrawal deadlines.

Weiner's Attributional Theory

Weiner (1985) proposed that the causes people assign to achievement outcomes can be classified along three dimensions. Locus asks whether the cause lies inside or outside the person. Stability asks whether it will persist. Controllability asks whether the person can change it. Each dimension has distinct consequences. Stability affects expectations of future success: if the cause will last, the outcome is expected to repeat. Locus affects self-esteem related emotions, such as pride or shame. Controllability affects emotions such as guilt, shame, anger and pity, both in the person and in observers.

Analyzing Malik's Attribution

Malik attributes his failure to low ability, which he sees as internal, stable and uncontrollable. Weiner's theory predicts exactly his reaction: internal locus brings shame, stability brings low expectations for the next quiz and uncontrollability brings hopelessness. Low expectancy, as earlier weeks showed, undermines effort, and his thoughts of dropping the course follow.

Other explanations were available. He studied for two hours, mostly rereading notes; he did not work practice problems; and the quiz came during a week of overtime at work. Lack of effort and an ineffective strategy are internal but unstable and controllable. An unusually busy week is external and unstable. Each of these would lead to different emotions, such as mild guilt or frustration, and to higher expectations for next time.

Judging Priya

Malik explained Priya's success by talent, a trait. Ross (1977) described a broad tendency, later called the fundamental attribution error, to explain others' behavior by their dispositions while underweighting the situations that shaped it. Observers see the person's behavior but not the hours of preparation or the circumstances behind it.

When Malik later asked Priya how she prepared, she said she had worked every practice problem twice over ten hours and had taken statistics before at a community college. Her success reflected effort, strategy and prior exposure, not only talent. Malik's own failure and her success both had controllable causes he had overlooked.

How Others React to the Explanation

Attributions also shape how other people respond. In Weiner's account, observers who see a failure as caused by something the person could not control tend to feel sympathy and offer help, while those who see it as caused by too little effort may feel irritation. When Malik told his study group he was "just bad at math," they reassured him but offered no practical help. When he later said he had studied the wrong way, two classmates sent him their practice schedules. A controllable explanation invited concrete support.

The Actor-Observer Difference

Malik's two judgments also show a related pattern. As an actor, people often point to circumstances to explain their own behavior, while as observers they point to traits in others. In math, Malik reverses the first half by blaming his own ability, yet he still follows the second half by explaining Priya's score through her traits.

Self-Serving Patterns

People often credit themselves for success and blame circumstances for failure, a self-serving bias that protects self-esteem. Malik shows the opposite pattern in math, blaming himself in a stable way for failure while attributing past math successes to luck. This reversed pattern is common in domains where a person holds a negative self-schema, as Malik does, and it is linked to lower persistence.

Malik saw Priya's 92 as a gift she was born with; it was ten hours of practice problems he never saw.

Expectations That Come True

Expectations can affect outcomes, not just interpretations of them. Jussim and Harber (2005) reviewed decades of research on teacher expectations and concluded that self-fulfilling prophecies in classrooms are real but usually modest, that most teacher expectations are fairly accurate because they reflect real differences among students and that effects can be larger for students from stigmatized groups and for those with low past achievement. They cautioned against claims that expectations alone create large differences in ability.

Malik's own expectations may operate similarly. Expecting to fail, he studies less and avoids help, which makes failure more likely and confirms his belief. His expectation of Jasmine from Week 3 worked the same way at his job. Changing expectations can interrupt this cycle, though it cannot replace building skill.

A Different Explanation

After a conversation with a classmate and his instructor, Malik revised his explanation: "I studied the wrong way, for too short a time, during a hard week." This attribution is controllable and unstable. It produces a different emotional reaction, disappointment and determination rather than shame, and a different expectation: if he changes his method, the next quiz can go better.

He changed his plan. He scheduled four one-hour blocks, worked practice problems rather than rereading, checked answers against worked solutions and attended a live review. On the second quiz, he scored 81 percent and, importantly, attributed the improvement to his new strategy and effort.

Limits of Changing Attributions

Attributions should be accurate, not just optimistic. If Malik had studied hard with good strategies and still failed, the honest explanation might involve gaps in prior preparation, which require tutoring rather than just more effort. Encouraging effort attributions without addressing real obstacles can lead to frustration.

Conclusion

Malik's first explanation for his failed quiz, low ability, was internal, stable and uncontrollable, producing shame, low expectations and thoughts of quitting. His judgment of Priya showed the tendency to underweight situations, and his low expectations risked becoming self-fulfilling. Revising the attribution to controllable causes changed his emotions, his plan and his results, illustrating how explanations drive motivation.

References

Jussim, L., & Harber, K. D. (2005). Teacher expectations and self-fulfilling prophecies: Knowns and unknowns, resolved and unresolved controversies. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 9(2), 131-155. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327957pspr0902_3

Ross, L. (1977). The intuitive psychologist and his shortcomings: Distortions in the attribution process. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 10, 173-220. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0065-2601(08)60357-3

Weiner, B. (1985). An attributional theory of achievement motivation and emotion. Psychological Review, 92(4), 548-573. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.92.4.548