preview

Attributional Bias

Decent Essays

An article published by John McClure, Luanna Meyer, Jessica Garisch, Ronald Fischer, Kirsty Weir and Frank Walkey in 2010 highlighted that whilst “research has found a relation between motivation and attributions for success and failure” few research studies have elucidated the relationship of attributions to possible cultural differences and school achievement (McClure et al., 2010). This statement and others similar in nature proposed by Lefcourt, von Baeyer, Ware and Cox (1979), Yan and Gaier (1994), Bochner (1994), Heine et al. (2001), Kudo & Numazaki (2003), Mezulis, Abramson, Hyde and Hankin (2004) and Koenig and Dean (2011) led to the present study being conducted to further evaluate the true effect of the self-serving attributional …show more content…

In their paper entitled ‘Is There a Universal Positivity Bias in Attributions? A Meta-Analytic Review of Individual, Developmental, and Cultural Differences in the Self-Serving Attributional Bias’, Mezulis et al. focussed on the magnitude, adaptiveness and ubiquity of the bias and found that nearly all samples included the bias with those within the child and older adult age groups showing the largest …show more content…

The study used a sample of 358 undergraduate students who were all presented the MMCS. The results of the study found that American, Chinese, Japanese, Korean and South East Asian participants reported a pattern of effort, ability, task and finally luck for both their successes and failures and that the ‘self-serving bias’ was only supported for the ability attribute. The results also showed that whilst American students credited achievement more significantly to ability than their Asian counterparts as well as more strongly believing that effort was more important for success than lack of effort for failure, Asian students recognized effort as equally important for both success and

Get Access