Read the passage given below to answer.
In our day-to day life, we assign certain causes or reasons to a person's behaviour. This process is called attribution. Broadly, causes of a person are attributed to internal and external factors. External factors are related to situation. With reference to success and failure, Weiner has classified causes into internal/external and stable/unstable factors. In general, people attribute success to internal factors such as their ability and hard work. However, failure is attributed to external factors such as task difficulty and bad luck. Ability/fate and hard-work/task-difficulty are considered as stable and unstable factors respectively. Stable factors refer to those causes that do not change with time. It has been observed that people have a tendency to give greater weightage to internal factors than external one. This phenomenon is called the fundamental attribution error. This tendency is stronger in some cultures than in others. Research suggests that Indians tend to make more external attributions than Americans do.
People generally attribute failure to :
Answer & explanation
Correct answer: option 3
The correct answer is Option (3) → External factors
A difference is found between the attribution made for success and that made for failure. People attribute success to internal factors, such as their ability or hard work, and failure to external factors, such as bad luck or the difficulty of the task. If you get bad marks, you are likely to say that you were unlucky or that the test was too difficult.
Option (1) Personality — Incorrect. Personality is something within the person, an internal cause; A hitting B ‘because A is a hot-tempered person’ is an internal, personality-related cause. People use such causes for success, not for their own failure.
Option (2) Disposition — Incorrect. Dispositional factors are the same as internal factors; they are also called ‘internal or dispositional factors’. Failure is pushed outside the person, away from her or his disposition.
Option (4) Internal factors — Incorrect. Internal factors such as ability and hard work are what people give for success. For failure they turn to causes outside themselves.
Note: The attributions people make for success and failure were explained in the chapter ‘Attitude and Social Cognition’ of the pre-rationalised NCERT, which NTA followed in 2022, and are not there in the NCERT book (2025-26) or in the 2023-24 NCERT.
NCERT (Pre-rationalised): “Attribution of Causality … When we assign a cause to a person’s behaviour, we can broadly classify the cause as being internal — something within the person, or external — something outside the person.…” “…There is a difference between the attribution made for success, and the attribution made for failure. In general, people attribute success to internal factors, such as their ability or hard work. They attribute failure to external factors, such as bad luck, the difficulty of the task, and so on.…” |