Sex Differences in Causal Attribution: A Self-Presentation Interpretation

Equal numbers of male and female subjects succeeded or failed on an anagram task and made causal attributions explaining their outcomes. Actual outcome was manipulated by varying the difficulty of the anagram task. Half of the subjects were led to believe their scores and ratings would remain private, whereas the other subjects were told they would participate in a group discussion about scores and causal explanations. Manipulation of anticipated privacy level had little effect under conditions of success, but after failure female subjects made relatively modest attributions in the public condition and relatively self-aggrandizing attributions in private. The attributions of males remained constant across public and private failure. Results were interpreted in terms of self-presentation needs.