Attributions in the sports pages

Extended the generality of attribution research by exploring several important issues in a highly involving real-world setting in which attributions naturally occur: athletic competition. 107 newspaper accounts of baseball and football games were coded for attributional content. These data support a motivational or self-enhancement explanation for the tendency to make internal attributions for success and external attributions for failure. No support was found for D. T. Miller and M. Ross's (1975) contention that this tendency is mediated by expectancies. It was also found that more attributions were made after unexpected, as opposed to expected, outcomes. There was a tendency for relatively more stable attributions to be given after expected outcomes. The advantages and disadvantages of studying attributions in archival data and the possibility of attributions justifying rather than explaining behavior are discussed. (25 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2006 APA, all rights reserved).