Sport And Exercise Psychology: A Critical Introduction

match outcome and type of attribution. If the self-serving bias is present, we would
expect a significantly higher proportion of internal than external attributions for
successful results and a significantly higher proportion of external than internal
attributions for failure outcomes.

Issues for discussion
Are success and failure objective events? How would achievement goal theorists
answer this question? In any case, can we be sure that people’s attributions expressed in
public situations reflect what they really believe?

So far, we have presented attribution theory as a powerful theory of people’s attempt to
make sense of their world. But this theory suffers from several limitations.

Weaknesses of attribution theory

At least three weaknesses have been identified in the application of attribution theory to
sport (see Biddle, Hanrahan and Sellars, 2001). First, it seems clear that athletic success
and failure are neither objective events nor synonymous with winning and losing,
respectively. To illustrate, imagine interviewing an athlete who won a competitive race—
but by a very close margin. Superficially, this performer embodies a winning mentality.
But what if this person’s opponents were of a low athletic standard? In this case, the
athlete may not regard barely winning a race against a poor field as being a successful
performance at all. Therefore, Biddle et al. (2001) argued that a win is not always
perceived as being a success and a loss is not always seen as an index of failure. The
practical implication of this principle is that attribution researchers in sport and exercise
psychology now tend to use subjective indices of success and failure whenever possible.
A second problem for attribution theory in sport is that researchers cannot always be sure
about what participants mean by certain words or phrases. For example, if a golfer says
that his or her opponent “played better” than s/he did in a match-play event, does this
signal a stable attribution (such that “my opponent is likely to defeat me again because
s/he is simply a better player”) or an unstable attribution (“my opponent defeated me on
the day—but I believe that I can defeat him/her the next time we play”)? Clearly,
researchers in this field should adopt a painstaking approach when investigating what
participants mean in using certain phrases (Biddle et al., 2001). A third complication for
attribution research in sport is that individual differences in explanatory tendencies may
affect the attributions that athletes make. Indeed, research suggests that there is a link
between the way in which athletes tend to explain events (their “attributional style”) and
their motivation to compete. Put simply, optimism and pessimism have motivational
consequences. For example, when sport performers habitually explain negative outcomes
(such as losing a match) by references to personal factors (i.e., to perceived causes which
are internal, stable and global, such as “it’s down to me; I can’t change it and it seems to
affect my whole life”), they are said to display a “pessimistic” explanatory style. In this
frame of mind, people may behave as if they are powerless to change their situation. Not
surprisingly, this despondency often leads to a loss in motivation. By contrast, when
athletes attribute negative outcomes to external, unstable and specific causes (e.g., “my

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