From The Sport Psych Handbook by Shane Murphy
A person’s beliefs can easily override urges or instincts; confidence, as we’ve discussed, is a valuable motivational asset. Accomplishment doesn’t always generate feelings of confidence, and failure doesn’t always diminish them. And we can’t merely wait for success in order to build self-efficacy. Enter attributions. Where self-efficacy explains the transition from expectation to effort, attribution addresses the causes of expectancy beliefs and how success and failure affect continued motivation. According to Bernard Weiner, who mainstreamed the burgeoning research on attributions, winning and losing by themselves are meaningless in incentive terms. Competitor A can view a loss as a victory: She played well, improved her performance, and gained the experience she needed to win the next time. Competitor B, on the other hand, might see a complete failure: “I must always win,” or “I must always execute correctly.”
What matters is how an athlete interprets positive or negative outcomes. Winning a racquetball match, for instance, could be the result of your superior skill, your opponent’s lack of sleep, lucky bounces, your new equipment, calls in your favor, or a whole host of reasons. Your belief in future successful outcomes hinges on which explanation you choose--and that choice is not always rational or accurate!
Three critical characteristics underlie attributions: (1) locus of causality (perceiving an outcome to have resulted from either internal or external factors); (2) stability (perceiving the likelihood of the same outcome recurring); and (3) locus of control (the perception of whether an outcome can be manipulated).
As you can see, there is plenty of room for the causes of performance to be pinned to more than one attribution category. For example, luck can be both a stability and a controllability factor; effort could be placed in any of the three loci. What matters is that attributions are perceptions, not facts. And exceptional coaches and athletes take the time to assess their perceptions. Coaches want to know, for instance, whether an athlete sees their abilitiy as unchangeable. Those who do tend to give up much more easily in the face of failure than those who believe they can change. Athletes who perceive their ability to be unstable, thinking “Some days I have it; some days I don’t,” may leave performance up to circumstance; they then turn in subpar effort on occasions when things don’t naturally fall into place. Similarly, evaluating where an athlete focuses is valuable. Research suggests that those who put their focus on controllable, or process-oriented, performance factors generally exhibit more tenacious effort.
Internal, stable, and controllable success attributions are considered ego-enhancing. However, some athletes are turned off by the perception that success is a stable commodity. Research shows that the most elite performers tend to show excitement and energy when uncertainty exists. Right after winning a Super Bowl, for example, the most motivated athletes will wonder, “Gosh, can I pull off back-to-back Super Bowl wins?” If the answer was forseeably negative, they would be less likely to train voraciously in the off-season.
Elite athletes also tend to be quite passionate about their failures, internalizing losses even when they couldn’t have done anything about them, looking forward to making personal adjustments, and taking the blame off teammates’ shoulders. For them, motivation springs from efforts to boost their future self rather than protect their current ego; the latter occurs when one attributes failures to external, unstable, and uncontrollable causes in an effort to avoid shame, frustration, anger, or other ego-damaging emotions that mitigate motivation.
The take-home message is that athletes need help and encouragement to look inside themselves for answers, see improvements they can make for the future, and enjoy what they’re doing rather than trying to manipulate or manage unstable and uncontrollable performance factors.
* To reprint this excerpt with permission from Human Kinetics Publishers, Inc., please contact the publicity department at 1-800-747-4457 or publicity@hkusa.com.
Human Kinetics
