The present study compares the attributions of young children 5 to 6.5 years of age with those of adult subjects 20 to 30 years of age, who were engaged in the same competitive situation. It was hypothesized that sex differences would occur in the sample of adults but not in the sample of children. Believing outcomes to be determined by either…

Investigated causal inferences between leader reward behavior and subordinate goal attainment, absenteeism, and work satisfaction. Results revealed that no significant differences were attributed to sex and that the leader reward behavior and subordinate attitudes and behavior were independent of the effects of sex of supervisor or subordinate.…

Parents' reactions to the attractiveness of children and the influence of children's gender on parents' reactions were investigated. It was expected that, when rating attractive children, parents would give higher evaluations and have greater expectations than when rating unattractive children. It was further expected that parents would exhibit…

A study examined whether there were differences in the ways that undergraduate college students viewed their academic performance. Relationships between sex of student, motivation, self esteem, achievement, and attributional pattern utilized were examined. Subjects (132 female, 104 male) were chosen on a voluntary basis; most were enrolled in a…

Examined aggressive and non-aggressive young adolescents' attributions of intent in hypothetical teacher-student interactions. Found that when teachers' intentions were ambiguous, aggressive adolescents were more likely than non-aggressive adolescents to attribute hostile intentions to teachers, were more likely to blame teachers for the outcome,…

Tested and extended Deaux's expectancy model of sex-linked differences in attribution for success. Finding's indicated that female occupational subjects, relative to males, tended to attribute success more to unstable causes of effort and luck. Male subjects attributed success more to the stable causes of ability and task ease. (Author/RC)

The connection between self-esteem, sex, and attributional style was examined in two studies. Results indicated that for positive events, high self-esteem subjects make more internal attributions than low self-esteem subjects, and for negative events, high self-esteem subjects make fewer internal attributions than low self-esteem subjects. The…

This report presents a study designed to determine if 5-year-olds possess an understanding of causation that conforms to the Weiner et al (1971) achievement model. This paper also studies the similarities between the attributional explanations of 5-year-olds and their teachers. Twenty-eight kindergarten students, largely part-Hawaiian, were asked…

The effects of cooperative and competitive reward structures on children's attributions and effective reactions to success and failure were examined. Results showed that competitive contingencies accentuated the differences in self-other perceptions and cooperative contingencies minimized these differences. (Author/GK)

Investigated the effects of playing violent versus non-violent video games on the interpretation of ambiguous provocation situation. Found that children playing a violent video game responded more negatively to three of six ambiguous provocation story questions than children playing the non-violent video game. Data suggest that playing violent…

This study compared the causal attribution by sex for academic failures of 38 learning disabled and 38 nondisabled elementary school students. The relationship between different attributional tendencies and a reading persistence task were also examined. (BS)

The decade of the 1970's saw an alarming decline in the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) scores of entering college freshmen, and it was theorized that this might be attributed to a corresponding decline in study attitudes. To test this hypothesis, math and verbal SAT scores, study habits, and attitudes of college freshmen in the classes of 1973 and…

Sex differences in attributions for success and failure in algebra of Samoan community college students were examined and compared with attributions of a large group of mainland U.S. students. study included the Mathematics Attribution Scale: Algebra Version (MAS), which assessed students' attributions of achievement in algebra to their effort,…

Discussed whether similarity affects the relationship between comparison and other-evaluation. Subjects read about an emergency, estimated their reaction, and evaluated a target who failed to help. Results showed increasing discrepancy between self and other's reactions led to more negative evaluations if self and target were the same sex.…

The achievement locus of control of 64 Hispanic and 87 Anglo students enrolled in grades 9-12 in 2 high schools in a large school district in the Southwest was examined with the Multidimensional-Multiattributional Causality Scale (MMCS). Ethnic and sex differences in the attributions of academic success or failure to ability, effort, context, or…