... on a task according to whether the locus of the cause is internal or external (i.e., something about the person or about the situation); stable or unstable (i.e. whether something is likely to fluctuate or is an enduring feature, e.g., intelligence); and whether something is controllable or uncontrollable (i.e. the extent to which a person has control over the cause, e.g., effort). A large body of research into attribution theory indicates that much of our attributional thinking is biased in ways that serve our own best interests, i.e., we tend to take credit for successes and attribute failure to external causes (Bradley, 1978; Nicholls, 1975; Riemer, 1975; Zuckerman, 1979). Thus, a child who performs well on a particular test may attribute their success to ability (internal cause) but attribute failure on the test to the test being difficult or to poor teaching (external cause). In contrast, research on the attributional ...

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