Gloomy but Smart - the Academic Consequences of Attributional Style

The social psychological literature concerning the relationship between attribution and performance has documented the detrimental effects of particular types of attributional pattern on performance, expectancies and mood. The present paper reports three studies in which there was a consistent relationship between attributional style and actual performance. Undergraduate students who tended to attribute achievement-orientated failure to stable, and to some extent global, causes actually performed well on subsequent academic and ability tasks. These findings are new and constitute a challenge to the prevailing assumptions in the literature.