Attributions for Success and Failure in Subjectively Recalled Life Experiences : The Effects of Sex and Sex Role Identity / Sandra S. Lee.

College students were asked to recall experiences of success and of failure from their own lives, and to indicate what they believed to be the reasons for success or failure. Results indicated that (1) women were more likely than men to attribute success to effort; (2) men attributed success to luck more often than women; (3) women had more pride after success than men; (4) women attributed failures to lack of ability more often than men; (5) all subjects generally attributed success to ability and effort more than to luck and task difficulty; and (6) androgynous women attributed success more often to ability and had higher future expectations after success than sex-typed females. The finding that men made more attributions to luck than women differs from most previous research on this theme. Such a difference may be due to reliance on recall of past life experiences for purposes of this study, rather than on laboratory tasks utilized by other researchers. (Author/MJL)

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