The Psychology of Gender 4th Edition

Achievement 205

Implications for Achievement. What are

the implications of sex differences in attribu-

tions for performance? If you fail an exam

because you believe you do not have the abil-

ity, what do you do? You might give up on

the subject, drop the class, and decide not to

pursue other classes in that area. If you fail an

exam and believe it was due to lack of effort

(i.e., you did not try hard enough), what do

you do? The answer is obvious: You try harder

next time. Thus the attributions we make for

failure can influence whether we persist in an

area or give it up completely.

TAKE HOME POINTS

■ At least for masculine tasks, which are basically achieve-

ment related, males and females make different attribu-

tions for their own performance. They also perceive the

causes of other males’ and females’ performance to differ.

■ In general, men’s success is attributed to internal causes,

in particular, ability, and women’s success is attributed to

internal, unstable causes (e.g., effort) or external causes

(e.g., luck). The implications are that men’s success will

be repeated, but women’s will not. By contrast, men’s

failure is attributed to external causes or internal, unsta-

ble causes (e.g., lack of effort), and women’s failure is

attributed to internal, stable causes (e.g., lack of ability).

The implications here are that women’s, but not men’s,

failure will be repeated.

■ People’s beliefs about the causes of their performance

have implications for their future efforts in that area.

If we attribute the cause of a failure to lack of abil-

ity, such as the case of females in math or males in

English, we are less likely to pursue work in that area.

If we attribute the cause of a success to an unstable

factor, such as females believing they have to put con-

siderable effort into math to do well, we also are less

likely to pursue work in that area. We are more likely

to pursue areas of interest in which we believe we have

the ability to succeed.

the children at the highest end of the gifted

spectrum (Nokelainen, Tirri, & Merenti-

Valimaki, 2007). A study of 8- to 9-year-olds

showed that boys and girls make different at-

tributions for math performance even when

their grades are the same. Girls were less

likely than boys to attribute math success to

ability but more likely than boys to attribute

math failure to lack of ability, despite the fact

that girls and boys had the same math grades

(Dickhauser & Meyer, 2006). These differ-

ences are shown in Figure 6.11. Even more

worrisome is that these findings were stron-

gest among the high math ability students.

If girls and boys have the same grades, why

are they assigning different causes to perfor-

mance? It appeared that boys and girls relied

on different information to infer their math

abilities. Girls relied on teacher evaluations,

whereas boys relied on both teacher evalua-

tions and their objective math performance.

Despite no difference in objective math per-

formance, teachers perceived that girls had less

math ability than boys. Girls assessed their own

abilities in terms of these teacher perceptions.

FIGURE 6.11 Boys are more likely than girls

to attribute math success to ability, and girls are

more likely than boys to attribute math failure to

lack of ability.

Source: Adapted from Dickhauser and Meyer

(2006).

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Math Attributed to Ability

(or lack of)

Male Female Male Female

Success Failure

M06_HELG0185_04_SE_C06.indd 205 6/21/11 8:10 AM