And the lucky shall inherit the earth: Perceiving the causes of financial and failure

Abstract

Whether or not actors attribute their successes to personal factors such as ability and/or effort and their failures to situational factors such as task difficulty or luck (see Miller and Ross, 1975, for a critical review), there is evidence that observers seem to adopt just such an attributional stance (Beckman, 1973;Feather and Simon, 1975;Frieze and Weiner, 1971; Ross, Bierbrauer and Polly, 1974 , although primarily concerned with sex effects in attributions made about hypothetical students in sex-linked academic programs (e.g., medicine, nursing), report that 'failure was more likely to be attributed to the difficulty of the task than success was to the ease of the task'. Frieze and Weiner (1971), reporting a pattern of findings consistent with these results, attempted to avoid explicit task definition by asking their subjects to imagine hypothetical actors doing hypothetical tasks. However, since the research was conducted in an academic setting,

Attribution Theory and Research

“…to ability, effort, "something about the person," stable traits, etc ( 1970, Study 6). Two of the other studies yield equivocal results (Feather & Simon 1975, Severance & Gasstrom 1977 and only one, dealing with extreme fi nancial success or failure, yields results counter to the gen eral trend (Younger et al 1977). In addition, three of Triandis's (1972) samples overwhelmingly favored internal explanations for success.…”

Causal Attributions for Financial Success and Failure: An Experimental Study

“…In the present study, 60 Australian undergraduates were randomly assigned to one of two experimental booklets containing deliberately brief descriptions of either a successful or a failure target (Younger, Arrowood, & Hemsley, 1976). After reading the description, the students attributed responsibility for the target's present condition on two 0-100% scales, one for personal responsibility (caused by ability, effort) and one for situational responsibility (caused by birth, luck), marked off in 10% increments.…”

Lay Explanations of Wealth: Attributions for Economic Success1

“…Feather (1974) reported that explanations of poverty were less biased towards individualistic causes in his Australian sample, and there were also significant intergenerational and demographic differences in the preferred explanations. Younger et al (1977), in a study of attributions for financial success or failure, found that successful targets were seen as "least responsible, and failure targets as most responsible for their present circumstances" (p. 5 1 1). More recently, Furnham (1981b) investigated explanations of poverty in a British sample and found that demographic variables, such as age, sex, political preference, class, and race, were all significantly related to the preferred attributional strategies of the judges.…”