Educational Psychology Review, Vol. 8, No. 2, 1996

Interview

An Interview with Bernard Weiner Janna Siegel 1 and Michael F. Shaughnessy 1,2

For over 30 years, the fields of personality and social psychology have been influenced by the work of Bernard Weiner. Dr. Weiner is currently professor of Psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is one of the leading contributors to attribution theory. His attribution theory of motivation and emotions has contributed greatly to the educational psychologist's understanding of how perceived causation influences motivation, behavior, and emotions. This theory has been applied to a wide range of topics and has been supported by numerous empirical studies. Dr. Weiner is the author of An Attributional Theory of Motivation and Emotion and has published extensively in professional journals. The first author was a graduate student at U.C.L.A. who worked with Dr. Weiner and has published on attribution retraining. The second author has conducted symposia and workshops on attribution theory and it's application to education. The interview was conducted in written format. 1. Q. What is the current "state-of-the-art" of attribution theory? A. Weil, there a r e a few states, depending on what part of attribution one is referring to. The work started by Hai Kelley on the antecedents of causal attributions--that is, how does one infer causality--has become increasingly sophisticated and now is in the hands of mathematically-oriented cognitive psychologists who are interested in more general inferential processes and the use of covariation information. The other side of attribution is the consequences. Given that one has reached a causal understanding, then so what? What difference does it make to what an event has been ascribed? I think our own work is most central here. We have been moving away from an analysis of achievement 1Eastern New Mexico University, Portales, New Mexico. 2Correspondence should be directed to Michael Shaughnessy, School of Education, Eastern New Mexico University, Portales, New Mexico 88130. 165 1040-726X/96/0600-0165509.50/0 © 1996 Plenum Publishing Corporation

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strivings and the causal dimensions of locus, stability, and controllability to an understanding of how others evaluate based on inferences of responsibility or nonresponsibility for an action. Here again one can also examine how are responsibility inferences reached--what is the role of mitigating fäctors--and so forth, as weil as the consequences of holding another responsible or not. 2. Q. What are you currently working on? A. I am working on the issue raised in the last question. The basic question is what is considered "sin" and what is "sickness." For example, obesity because of overeating is sin; obesity because of a thyroid problem is sickness. This construal appears to pervade our life. It is the formulation of both law (the distinction between murder and manslaughter, for example, and theology. So, I am interested in how everyday life captures this distinction. Life as a courtroom is a major metaphor, where we judge one another, sentence each other, allow for appeals and "parole" (I will now start talking to you again), and so forth. So, I am much more social psychological in my orientation, as opposed to my initial interest in achievement strivings. What I am attempting to formulate is a general theory of social conduct, one that can account for some aspects of helping, aggression, achievement evaluation, reactions toward the stigmatized, and other aspects of interpersonal behavior that incorporate beliefs about responsibility. 3. Q. How does attribution theory help us explain motivation in special education? How does it explain motivation in education in general? How does it explain motivation in college/university education? A. Achievement outcomes elicit "why" questions: "Why did I fail" is one that is very pervasive. The answer to that question given by individuals plays a major role in their subsequent strivings. I do not distinguish between special education students in grammar school and graduate students--each is seeking to understand causality in regards to their personal outcomes. The graduate student who feels incapable of competing at this level has some of the same psychodynamics as the special education student who does not feel competent in his or her mainstreamed class. 4. Q. How would you explain the welfare system in the U.S. using attribution theory? A. I would not explain the system, but rather how people react to others on welfare. I f you ask: "Do you want to help needy children?" individuals will answer "yes." If you ask: "Do you want to help single mothers who have babies?" the answer is "no." The former question focuses on a group that is not responsible for their plight, the latter on a group that typically is perceived as responsible.

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Help-giving tendencies in good part are guided by this inference. The welfare system, as I understand it, initially was introduced to help widowed women. It was not introduced to help divorced women, for they were "sinners," responsible for their condition. Even today, widowhood will elicit more sympathy than divorce (or, considering the opposing direction, divorce will elicit more anger than widowhood from, for example, parents); not always, of course. Not all parents are mad at their divorced son or daughter. But, many times, this is one of the affects elicited.

5. Q. How does attribution contribute to high ability, high achievement, and giftedness? A. There are two perspectives to consider: self-perception and the perception of others. Certain attributions are maladaptive in that they are likely to reduce achievement strivings. Among these are attributions of failure to lack of ability, which produce low expectancies of future success (tied to the stability dimension of causality), low self-esteem (linked with the locus dimension), and humiliation and shame (because these are perceived as uncontrollable). On the other hand, failure ascribed to insufficient effort results in maintenance of expectancy of success and guilt, both motivators. Continuing commerce with the task increases specific ability (which is unstable, as opposed to underlying "intelligence" which is perceived as stable). Thus, by influencing task persistence, attributions also influence actual task ability. The same is true from the perspective of others. If I ascribe your failure to low ability, then I (as teacher) offer sympathy, do not punish for failure, and give unsolicited help. All these are cues that you "cannot," which starts the cycle indicated above. So other-perception and self-perception form a unity, together, which influence task persistence and, therefore, actual ability. Some of this is captured in the false-expectancy literature.

6. Q. How can people best change attributions? Should people be changing attributions? Has changing attributions been successful? A. This change can be effective, but only for a small subset of individuals not performing to their capacity. These programs assume that the persons value what they are doing. Thus, individual A wants to do weil at work, but feels she does not have the ability. In this case, changing the ascription to lack of sufficient training, to the growing ease of the job, to bad luck, will help the person persist in the face of hard times. How to best do this has not been settled. Role models, reinforcement techniques, persuasion from authorities, and so forth have all been used. There is an insufficient amount of research to declare any procedure "best." But if the individual does not care about succeeding, it makes no difference (or little difference) what the attribution is for failure. Among our

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school children, problems of value (who cares) are probably far more important than questions in regard to misattribution of the causes of failure. 7. Q. How may attributions be different for individuals with disabilities? A. They have a very salient and obvious attribution: I am handicapped, or whatever the disability is. This is complex. Since the disability is not controllable and, therefore, the person does not hold himself/herself responsible, others do not blame him/her, standards may be lower, there will be less anger from others, and less personal guilt and more sympathy and shame (humiliation). So, the dynamics of failure ascribed to a disability may be quite different from the failure dynamics of one not having this handicap. This assumes comparison with unlike others. If comparisons are to those others with disabilities, then the same attributions cannot be made. That is why the disabled are at times harsher on one another than are the able on the disabled. 8. Q. What is the difference between social and personal theories of achievement striving? A. There is a fuzzy distinction between these two. By personal theories of achievement, I have in mind explaining how long someone who is alone in a room will persist, or work on a task. A major determinant may be, for example, expectancy of success. Of course, expectations from significant others such as a teacher or parent may play a role in persistence, but they are not inherent in this situation. On the other hand, how a teacher reacts to the pupil, I regard as game for a theory of social motivation. The phenomenon is, by definition, interpersonal. Similarly, how a handicapped person copes with his/her plight I would consider part of personal motivation (even if social support is one determinant of this). But, how we react to the handicapped is by definition a social act. These two--and as I said, the boundary is fuzzy--are subject to some differences when constructing a motivaüonal theory, particularly in regards to the affects that are elicited. 9. Q. Some teachers, in lieu of expecting more effort from some students, simply decide to ignore or placate them. What are the outcomes of simply ignoring students in schools and passing them through ? A. Again, from an attributional perspective, ignoring is a low ability cue. Imagine, for example, that your Little League coach does not put you in to play, and finally in the 9th inning turns to you and says, "You go in now, everyone else has played, and play right field." Then he says to the second baseman, "Play deep in case any balls are hit to right." All this communicates that the coach has given up: You have low baseball ability. The Little Leaguer picks this up and it contributes to the self-perception of low ability. So, pure ignoring will also communicate this. Now, it can be argued that in fact, these children "cannot"; what can then be done? There is all

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the difference in the world between a low-ability vs. a task difficulty attribution, In the latter case, the task can be changed. That is, if aspiration is altered, then subjective success can be attained. 10. Q. What are the effort attribution differences in Japan, (a high achieving place) as opposed to the United States? A. I think Stevenson and his colleagues such as Stigler have documented the greater importance placed on effort in the Asian countries. They ascribe outcomes more to effort, whereas the American mothers appear to think that ability is the more important determinant of performance. I was struck when in Japan by the importance of pleasing others in the in-group as a key determinant for motivation and performance. So, they are not as "individually driven" as appears (at least, to me). 11. Q. As a society, what can educators and psychologists do with people who have very low ability and little motivation? What will be the repercussions ? A. This depends on whether the low ability results in, or from, lack of motivation. If these are linked in a causal chain, then we have to ensure that task difficulty is lessened, so that there is a greater "can." By lowering aspiration level, some degree of success might then be attained. We tend to like those things we are good at, so motivation might then follow. An attribution to low ability and to an overly difficult task have quite different consequences. Having the ascription to a different task allows one to change directions (lower aspiration), maintain esteem, raise expectancies, and pursue goals that are attainable. 12. Q. What about individuals who are inconsistent in their motivation, especially the learning disabled? Can we make their motivational states more consistent? A. Well, for me to answer this, I would have to know more about the situations that promote vs. inhibit effort. Often, persistence vs. quitting has been attributed to a personal characteristic, such as high vs. low need for achievement. But variablility in motivation points out the importance of situational variables as determinants of achievement striving. If the motivation is inconsistent, then there must also be alteration in the immediate determinants of action. The goal for the teacher is to make the discrimination between these two states and find what are the motivating vs. demotivating conditions. This takes me somewhat away from attribution theory, although it is quite possible that the variability is attributionally mediated. Does one teacher communicate high and another low ability? However, of course, many other variables also are at work, particularly task engagement, social factors, and so forth. 13. Q. Responsibility seems to be a crucial construct today. What has your research shown in this area? What is your feeling about the pervasive

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attempt to escape responsibility in the legal system by blaming parents, abuse, and the like, for criminal acts? A. I have addressed some of these issues already. What is interesting is the array of phenomena which elicit responsibility attributions. For example, we hold others responsible for being sad (depression), for addictions to drugs, and for homosexual behavior, obesity, and other stigmas which may have a very large genetic component. There is a belief that others are not accepting responsibility and are instead blaming society, parents and others rather than facing their situations and accepting responsibility. But, at times, this is adaptive. For example, raising consciousness in the women's movement partly included the belief that their status was not due to their personal shortcomings, but rather to the barriers imposed by society. The same process guided the civil rights movement. So, displacing responsibility is not necessarily bad or incorrect. In addition, external attributions help in the maintenance of esteem (attributions of failure to the self lower esteem). But, of course, abrogation of responsibility then precludes the individual from taking instrumental actions at change. I guess what I am saying is that I would not make a general statement about the good or evil of accepting vs. rejecting self-responsibility. This depends on the situation and other factors. There are legitimate mitigators of responsibility: lack of capacity, mental illness, infancy, impossibility to control an action, and so on. When these are appropriate to raise as mitigators is very difficult. I cannot say if a battered woman truly had no other choice than to kill her battering husband. Cold-blooded murder must be distinguished from the absence of choice. This will have to be decided individually in each case. 14. Q. Would training teachers to assess intellectual ability assist them in their work with handicapped students and low achieving students? Would it help modify their expectations? A. Well, this is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, if they made this assessment, it would be quite salient. Low ability students would be labeled and receive feedback consistent with this belief. Whether it is assessed or not, teachers will reach some conclusion in any case about capabilities. A moral evaluation, in any case, is not based on ability, but rather on the expenditure of effort. The teacher's goal is to have each student maximize potential through task involvement. I.Q. would be effective if, and only if, this information could help one enhance effort expenditure. 15. Q. What questions still need to be researched in attribution theory? A. As attribution theory becomes extended into new domains and areas, new questions are raised. For example, it is known that families that express negative emotions toward schizophrenic family members increase

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the likelihood that this individual will return to the hospital. Recently, it has been found that the expression of anger is preceded by attributions of responsibility and eontrollability. The family feels the person "need not" act that way. Further, it is now known that active symptoms (hallueinations) are less likely to produce controllability attributions and inferenees of responsibility than are passive symptoms (apathy, laying in bed). So, here we have a whole new direction for attribution t h e o r y , where the questions now can include "What are the antecedents that result in blaming another for mental illness?" This keeps recurring in the attribution field. As new mines are discovered, new questions arise. I do not have any "unresolved" issues that I believe need clarification. There are as many as there are new issues. For me, I do wonder how responsibility inferences are reaehed. What developmental antecedents have linked responsibility with anger and nonresponsibility with pity? 16. Q. Would it help if teachers were able to assess attributional styles in their students? A. I do not have strong beliefs in attributional styles. Attributions are very situation specific and often do not generalize. I attribute my failure at fixing appliances to a total lack of aptitude; my failure when a journal article is rejected to an unfair reviewer; my failure with a child to my impatience, which I should be able to control. So, what happened to style? The data on the generality of attributions across situations is very weak. I think that this has received more attention than has been deserved. 17. Q. What do you think about your own contribution to social psychology? A. I would like to think that others have the same kind of uncertainty and vacillation that I do. On the one hand, I like to think that I have contributed such that if anyone writes a book about motivation or social psychology, then some of my work would be included. This either could be empirical relations that I feel are quite replicable, or my theoretical contributions at developing general laws of personal and social conduct. On the other hand, I also know that 15 minutes of fame is the norm, so I tell myself do not expect immortality. When I was a student, Clark Hull and Kenneth Spence were Godlike (even though I did not follow in that tradition). Now, many of my graduate students do not really know who they were. And I even no longer cite my own mentor, John Atkinson. I think I have contributed something, and the contribution euts across areas so that my work has influenced not only social psychology, but also educational psychology, motivation, organizational psychology, and other fields. I do get a lot of ego-satisfaction from the amount that the work appears to influence others. 18. Q. How did you get interested in the field of attribution?

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A. I started out in the study of achievement motivation, using the TAT to assess individual differences in the need for achievement. However, it soon became clear to me that this was not the most fruitful approach to understand this type of motivation. I then turned to the issue of how do people interpret their successes and failures. In a book, I give appropriate credit to one of my early students, Linda Beckman, for she came to me with this as a thesis topic. At first, I was reluctant to approve of this as a topic, but the more I thought about phenomenal causality, the more I realized that this would provide me with one road to the cognitive processes that have motivational influence. After that, it seemed that I had hit a gold mine, and wherever I put in the shovel, there was some gold to mine. And, of course, Fritz Heider and Harold Kelley provided me initially with the proper shovels and equipment. 19. Q. Your more recent work focuses on the role of emotion and affect. Could you bring us up to date on this work ? A. I have never been an emotion theorist, but rather I am an attribution theorist who has incorporated emotions into the theoretical picture. Hence, I am only interested in emotions that have attributions as antecedents. But this includes some of our most important emotions: anger, given an attribution of a negative event to something controllable by others; gratitude, given an attribution of a positive event to something controllable by others; pity, given an attribution of a negative stare or action to something uncontrollable by others; guilt, given an attribution of a negative outcome to something controllable by the self; shame, given an attribution of a negative outcome to something uncontrollable by the seil; and perhaps a few others. My current interest guided by this appraisal approach is the role of affect as mediators of prosocial and antisocial behavior. The affects of particular concern are anger and sympathy. Thus, for example, if you intentionally do harm to me, then I am angry and seek to retaliate; on the other hand, if you have failed because of lack of aptitude, then I feel sympathetic and will tend to help. This relates to a basic distinction of sin vs. sickness. If you have AIDS because of promiscuous sexual behavior, observers tend to be angry and do not give support, whereas AIDS because of a transfusion with contaminated blood generates sympathy and help. Emotions provide the bridge between thinking and doing, and I am interested in the range of social behaviors that are emotionally-mediated. 20. H/hat research are you planning for the coming years? A. It appears to me that I am becoming more interested in the general areas of social justice. Just now, I have some research ongoing that examines the utilitarian vs. retributive functions of punishment. This includes

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not just criminal punishment but reprimand for coming late for an appointment, or for not studying in class. Why do we punish students who do not try? Is it merely rehabilitative or a deterrence? Or is retribution also involved? Also, how do these principles of punishment relate to attribution theory? I suspect that causal stability underlies use of utilitarian consequences, whereas causal controllability is associated with retribution. Without becoming too specific, the antecedents and goals of punishment--and how these relate to causal appraisals, inferences of responsibility, and emotions--seem to be a direction I am going. And this is one step toward the larger issue of justice. 21. As we approach the year 2000, how do you see attribution and your work fitting into mainstream psychology ? A. I don't see why not. Attribution is a word that most psychologists know. It is in every social psychology text. And this is true for other fields as well. Learned-helplessness became an attributional approach to depression. There is now a growing area of the study of schizophrenia; making use of attributions that the family makes for the symptoms of the patient. This appears a very key determinant of recidivism. So, attribution has a firm foundation and far-reaching consequences. Whether this will be "my" work or the work of others, I do not see attribution as falling off the end of the earth (as, say other theorists have, such as Drive Theory of Hull and other conceptions within social psychology and motivation). 22. Q. Your theory is pan-cultural: over time, over places, over cultures. How can you account for this? A. Because a basic question that taust be asked is "Why did this happen?" If I belong to a primitive tribe, and my main hunter keeps failing to bring back any food, then I must ask "Is there something wrong with the hunter?" (and have that person retire), or "Is the environment no longer rich in supplies?" (so that we should move elsewhere). Questions about the locus, stability, and controllability of causes are fundamental to existence. For this reason, I see great generalizability of my principles across cultures and historical time periods. There is a movement in social psychology that questions if laws can span time and history; I believe that we will find such laws, and perhaps some of them will be attributional. 23. 14"hat current work in the field do you most admire and why? A. I am rather myopic and not as broadly read as I once was. I admire two kinds of contributions: those that are empirically certain, and those that are conceptually rich. These need not be the same bodies of knowledge. Thus, I am impressed and admire some of the cross-cultural findings that sociobiologists have pointed out: Younger females marry older males, males are more concerned with sexual characteristics, and females with responsibility-correlated characteristics, and so forth. I am less taken with

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the explanation given, but these are facts that are in need of explanation. I always try to read anything that Paul Meehl writes, even when I can only understand a small part of it. Dr. Weiner can be reached at the University of California, Los Angeles, Psychology Department, Franz Hall, Los Angeles, California 90024. He continues to write, research and publish extensively on attribution theory and motivation.