Explanatory Style as a Mechanism of Disappointing Athletic Performance

Two university varsity swimming teams took the Attributional Style Questionnaire (ASQ) at the start of the season. Swimmers with a pessimistic explanatory style wellt on to show more unexpected poor performances during competition titan optimistic swimmers. We then tested the purported mechanism of this effect by experimentally simulating defeat, giving each swimmer falsely negative' times. Performance deteriorated for tllOse swimmers with a pessimistic explanatory style for bad events on their next swim, whereas performance for those swimmers with an optimistic style did not. Some people habitually explain bad events by causes that are stable in time, global in effect, and internal, but explain good events by causes that are unstable, specific, and external. The reformulation of the learned helplessness model of depression (Abramson, Seligman, & Teasdale, 1978) predicts that individuals who have this pessimistic style of explaining events sh0!1ld do worse than expected in achievement situations, whereas people 'with a more optimistic style should do better. A pessimistic explanatory style is claimed to lead to poor performance because it contributes to the expectation that bad events will recur in several domains. In tum, this expectation leads to lowered voluntary response initiation following failure (Seligman, 1975). The prediction that people with a pessimistic explanatory style"will show poorer achievement than "people with an optimistic style has been supported in field studies of academiC performance (Dweck & Licht; i980; Nolen-Hoeksema, Girgus, & Seligman, 1986; Peterson & Barrett, 1987) and the workplace (Seligman & Schulman, 1987). But no field Send correspondence and reprint requests to: Martin E.P. Seligman, Department of Psychology, University of Pennsylvania, 3815 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104. study to date has tested the mechanism by which pessimistic style impairs achievement. We asked if pessimistic explanatory style predicts poorer than expected athletic performance and if it works by the mechanism of lowered response initiation specifically following defeat.