Attribution Theory

Exam Question #1: Attribution Theory As discussed earlier in the text, motivation is the desire that an individual develops to fuel a drive for success. Individuals may find motivation in the form of external rewards (extrinsic motivation), or simply through internal gratification (intrinsic motivation), knowing that they are exhibiting a great deal of effort in a given activity. When an athlete experiences success or failure they are likely to attribute those successes or failures to different circumstances. This process of attributing causes for successes and failures is a process known as attribution theory, and can be defined as “a cognitive approach to motivation in which perceived causation plays an important role in explaining
My observations throughout my athletic career are that when I am most successful is when I believe I will have an excellent performance and when I accept responsibility for the outcome. I can remember a time where I had contracted mono during the fall and was sidelined from competition for most of the season. I had fully recovered by the end of the fall and resumed training by the start of early winter. While I was doing the best workouts I had ever completed thus far in my career I was falling well short of my expectations during competitions. I could not figure out what the problem was, as my training was going phenomenal, but my results were very poor. I kept falling back on the same excuse after every bad performance, that I was still experiencing lingering effects from the mono. As the season progressed my performances steadily declined until I ended up not even advancing to the state meet. A meet I had won the year I prior, I had failed to even gain entry to this year. The entire season I had attributed my failures to internal, stable, yet uncontrollable causes. I truly believed that my lack of success throughout the season was due to circumstances out of my control. While early failures may have been due to a lack of fitness caused by illness related setbacks, the failures I experienced later that season were all due to the attribution of failure to an uncontrollable cause. Upon the completion of the spring season I took a short break and travelled to a former coach’s residence to train and prepare for the upcoming fall season. The first thing my coach said to me after my first workout was, “Cory you are very fit physically so the only thing we have to work on is strengthening you from the neck up.” As I started to believe I had the ability to control the outcomes of my successes, I started to excel again