Human beings have a tendency to attribute causes to their behaviors. Faced with the actions performed, we are prone to deduce and interpret their origin.
The Attribution theory, postulated by psychologist Fritz Heider, refers to the study of how we interpret our own behavior and that of others, ‘attributing’ it to different causes that may or may not correspond to reality or to the effect they generate.
Our own behavior and skiing events are explained through the attributive process on the basis of two types of causes: internal causes are those in which what happens is attributed to our own reasons; external causes are attributed to sources beyond our control. Among the internal causes are considered capacity, effort, personality, motivation, state of mind, and attitude. External causes would include the characteristics of the context, the actions and decisions of others, the conditions of the environment, the difficulty of execution, and chance.
Our own attributions about the causes of our successes or failures will determine the effort we will apply in future learning. If the attributions are positive, then we will generate a high expectation and predisposition for future activities, and vice versa if the attributions are negative.
If we perceive that our success matches our expectations, we will attribute it to our own qualities, but if it is a failure that does not match our expectations, we will be prone to attribute it to the conditions of the context. By attributing successes to our own competence but not failures, we try to influence how we are socially perceived and thus enhance self-worth.
If we have a high level of self-awareness, we tend to attribute our failures to personal causes if we perceive a high probability of progress, but if we perceive it as depreciated, we will tend to attribute them to external causes. Having low self-consciousness we will be prone, regardless of the perception of probable progress, to attribute our failures to external causes.
An important aspect of attributional bias is that which relates to self-worth. If we value ourselves negatively, we will consider that our ineptitude as skiers is a fixed attribute that we cannot change and our motivation will diminish. But if we attribute poor skiing to fatigue, then we will believe that having rested enough we will be able to improve it. This internal behavioral factor is considered to be controllable and modifiable, compared to external and uncontrollable factors such as snow, slope, or weather conditions.
This theory would apply to recreational and competitive skiing. Instructors and coaches can guide their learners and athletes to properly attribute the causes of their mistakes and failures. When a learner or an athlete attributes a mistake to his lack of technical ability and perceives it as something beyond control, his self-esteem and motivation would decrease.
Instead, if he realizes that it is a controllable and modifiable factor through effort, training, and practicing effective technique, his self-esteem and motivation would increase and would perceive himself as competent to improve his performance.
The same can be applied to the behavior of instructors and coaches. In case of success, they can take ownership of the causes of their learners’ and athletes’ success, but if they fail they might attribute it to their inadequate performance.
Examples:
- The skier who suffers a fall tends to attribute it to the condition of the snow, the slope, or its congestion. He would seek to make sense of the origin that generated his fall without worrying if it was due to an improper maneuver.
- The athlete who, after a mediocre performance, attributes the causes to the coach who did not prepare him adequately.
- If an instructor treats a learner discourteously, the learner may consider the instructor to have a bad character and label him as a bad person, regardless of the fact that the instructor may have experienced situations prior to the class that predisposed him to act inconsiderately. The learner made an attributional disposition relating the instructor’s incorrect attitude directly to his personality, instead of considering the previous external causes that generated the inattention.
Actor-observer effect
It was mentioned that when we observe the behaviors that lead to failure in others, we tend to attribute them to their personal predisposition, but when we evaluate ourselves after a failure, we are prone to attribute our behaviors to situational causes. This occurs because attributional perspectives as an actor and as an observer may differ. In other words, we tend to think that the bad things happening to us is not our fault but think the opposite when the same happens to another skier. This would be due to our need for self-esteem by which a perceptual process is distorted leading to the propensity to perceive ourselves favorably.
This effect, depending on whether we evaluate ourselves as actors or others as observers, tends to diminish if the person being observed skiing incorrectly happens to be a friend or family member. In this case we, as observers, will attribute the causes of the negative behavior to the external situation and not to the internal conditions of the observed skier.
Generally, in our own evaluation we have more information while in the observation of the behavior of others we have only what is observable. This behavior expresses a Self-defense mechanism which would explain the tendency to attribute external reasons as the causes of our own failures, and internal reasons when observing the failures of others, as well as the propensity to perceive a threat to our self-image, therefore, we feel the need to protect it but not so if that of others is threatened.
Examples:
- The skier who is promoted to a higher class attributes it to his ability but if he is not, he attributes it to the instructor not being sympathetic to him.
- When an athlete does not achieve the result he was looking for, he would attribute it to issues beyond his control but would tend to believe in luck when his teammate achieves success, denying that it was due to his optimal performance.
- The skier attributes a good descent to his individual qualities but attributes a poor one to the instructor’s or his group mates’ choice of slope.
- A beginner who has problems controlling his balance interprets that it is due to the situation (new activity, unstable surface, limiting material) but when he observes others in the same situation he considers only their behavior and not the situational context.
- The skier who descends a slope within a lesson and does it poorly might attribute it to the fact that he has never descended a slope of those characteristics before; but if he observes another learner of the same class descending in a defective way he might attribute it to the insufficient aptitude or level that skier possesses.
Defensive attribution
Defensive attribution deals with the beliefs we use to defend ourselves from being the cause or the victim of an accident. It is manifested when, upon observing an accident, there is a tendency to attribute blame to the accident victim in order to avoid the feeling of being vulnerable in a situation in which we have no control, as well as to assure ourselves that it will not happen to us.
One aspect of defensive attribution is the optimistic bias. Here, we believe that positive events happen to us more than to others and that negative events happen to others. For example, if we possess excessive optimism may ignore warning signs and precautions to take in an avalanche zone because we believe that a landslide will not happen to us.
In addition, it should be considered that social attributions of responsibility will be in accordance with the severity of the event: the more serious the incident, the more responsibility tends to be attributed to a person for causing it.
