The Role of Causal Attribution in Determining Group Members’ Emotional Responses to Failure

Weiner’s [1, 2] attribution theory of motivation and emotion was used as a framework for explaining reactions of group members to their failure in a cooperative task when the group caused this failure. The results of two studies utilizing a new paradigm in which dyads perform a cooperative task requiring the assembly of a structure using Lego blocks are reported. All dyads who failed the task received feedback about the cause of their failure, which varied along the causal dimensions of controllability and stability. Overall, results indicate that the emotional reactions and behavioral intentions following the failure, including ones related to the group’s future, can be explained by the principles of attribution theory. This was true both for dyads comprising participants with minimal relationships between them (Study 1) and friends (Study 2). On the whole, the research extends the scope of attribution theory to causes that are construed at the group rather than the individual level and also provides an effective paradigm for the study of group failure and its consequences.