Description

Tendency for people to refer to internal rather than external factors when explaining a person's behavior.

Heider, F. (1958). The psychology of interpersonal relations. New York: Wiley.

Items (1)

The task is adapted from the paradigm of Sedikides et al. (1998) in which participants engage in two achievement tests. In each test, participants are presented with twenty anagrams and asked to solve as many as possible within 2 minutes. After each test, they receive bogus feedback about their performance: a positive feedback on one test ("You have performed better than 93% of the normative sample") and a negative feedback on the other test ("You have performed worse than 69% of the normative sample"), regardless of their actual performance. After each test, participants indicate their agreement with four statements that provide explanations for their test results on a scale ranging from 1 (not at all) to 7 (very much). Two of the statements relate to internal factors (skills and effort) while two relate to external factors (the selection of anagrams and bad luck).

Scoring

Compute (a) a score for success attributions by subtracting external attribution ratings of success from internal attribution ratings of success, (b) the equivalent score for failure attributions. The attribution bias (self-serving bias) is calculated as a – b.

Sources

Schneider, I. K., Novin, S., van Harreveld, F., & Genschow, O. (2021). Benefits of being ambivalent: The relationship between trait ambivalence and attribution biases. The British journal of social psychology, 60(2), 570–586.

Sedikides, C., Campbell, W. K., Reeder, G. D., & Elliot, A. J. (1998). The self-serving bias in relational context. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74(2), 378–386.