Revision question p 460 1. Casual attribution is a method in which to attribute what caused success or failure in a certain situation. There are four categories which are Ability, Luck, task difficulty and effort. These four categories can be split into 2 sub-groups Internal/ external and stable/unstable. 2. Attribution theory looks at the reason for why someone failure or succeeded in a certain situation. This is important from a sports psychologists view because models such a Wieners give people the ability to blame their failure on external reasons out of there control and therefore keep motivation high. 3. The locus of causality dimension indicates whether the attribution relates to factors that are either internal or external to the performer. Effort and ability represent internal factors while task difficulty and luck are external and are known as environmental variables.
Stability indicates whether attributions are stable or unstable. Stability refers to the degree of permanence associated with an attribution factor. A stable factor is considered permanent and unchangeable, for example ability. An unstable factor, by contrast, is temporary and can be changed. Luck is an example of an unstable factor.
Control, which will be considered later, is a third dimension of the attribution model. It is not referred to directly in the specification but is a key factor in the important process of attribution retraining. 4. If a hockey player continues to lose because the teams are playing are constantly better then he or she will start to become depressed or try to avoid the sport in general because he or she does not think there is a point of playing to continuously lose. This is made worse if he or she puts in a massive amount of effort and lose very convincingly. However if a player continues to win then they are likely to become very prideful and arrogant. 5. A high achiever usually when they win will attribute their success to internal factors such as their own ability or the amount of effort they put in and therefore increase motivation. Whereas when they lose they will blame losing on external factors such as the weather or the difficulty of the task. 6. Learned helplessness is a theory that focuses on a performer who perceives failure to be due low ability, or success to external unstable factors. This is all showing a person who is out of control. It is important because if someone carries on with this then it can lead to depression and avoidance of sport. It can affect all areas of their life and make it really hard to succeed. 7. A way that a coach could try and alleviate this would be to allow a player to achieve success by playing a weaker opponent to increase motivation. Another way to alleviate this would be to encourage a view that success is due to stable internal factors such as ability.