defeat was just a freak occurrence and it doesn’t affect the most important things in my
life”), they are displaying an “optimistic” explanatory style—which helps them to learn
from their defeat and to work harder in the future. Clearly, certain athletes can achieve a
healthy resilience by thinking optimistically in the face of adversity. Why does optimism
make athletes more resilient? One possible explanation (Seligman, 1998) is that an
optimistic outlook allows athletes to keep their confidence levels high—encouraging
them to believe that they have the ability to overcome any temporary setbacks. Put
simply, therefore, athletes with low motivation tend to interpret setbacks as being
permanent. On the other hand, optimists tend to believe that positive outcomes (e.g.,
winning a football match) are not caused by luck but have causes that are relatively
permanent in nature (such as ability).
Attributional style and athletic performanceAs explained earlier, the term attributional style or “explanatory style” (ES) refers to
people’s tendency to offer similar kinds of explanations for different events in their lives.
More precisely, it reflects “how people habitually explain the causes of events” (Peterson,
Buchanan and Seligman, 1995, p. 19). It can be measured using a general self-report
instrument called the “Attributional Style Questionnaire” (ASQ; Peterson, Semmel, Von
Baeyer, Abramson, Metalsky and Seligman, 1982). This questionnaire requires people to
identify causes for twelve hypothetical situations (involving six “good” outcomes and six
“bad” outcomes) and to rate these causes along three bipolar dimensions: locus of
causality, stability and globality. As explained earlier, the first of these dimensions refers
to whether the alleged causal event is internal (due to the person involved) or external
(due to someone else). The second dimension relates to whether the cause in question is
stable (or likely to last for the foreseeable future) or unstable (i.e., short-lived). The third
dimension refers to whether it is global (i.e., likely to affect every aspect of one’s life) or
specific (i.e., or highly circumscribed in its effects). Although the ASQ is
psychometrically adequate, it is not designed specifically for athletic populations.
Therefore, an alternative test called the Sport Attributional Style Scale (SASS; Hanrahan,
Grove and Hattie, 1989) was devised for use in sport and exercise settings. This sixteen-
item scale is also available in a shortened (ten-item) format (Hanrahan and Grove, 1990).
In general, psychometric evidence in support of the SASS has been encouraging (Biddle
and Hanrahan, 1998). For example, most of its sub-scales appear to be correlated
significantly with those of the criterion instrument, the Attributional Style Questionnaire
(ASQ).
Research on the relationship between explanatory style and athletic performance has
generated some interesting findings. For example, Seligman, Nolen-Hoeksema, Thornton
and Thornton (1990) discovered that university swimmers with a pessimistic explanatory
style (ES) were more likely to perform below the level of coaches’ expectations during
the season than were swimmers with a more optimistic outlook. In fact, the pessimists on
the Attributional Style Questionnaire had about twice as many unexpectedly poor swims
as did their optimistic colleagues. In the same study, pessimistic swimmers were less
likely to “bounce back” from simulated defeats than were optimistic counterparts. Third,
the explanatory style scores of the swimmers were significantly predictive of swimming
performance even after coaches’ judgements of ability to overcome a setback had been
Motivation and goal-setting in sport 49