Relational Closeness and Production of Excuses in Events of Failure

Abstract

According to Weiner's motivational model of attribution, a person failing to perform an expected action will often respond by producing excuses to account for the behavior. These excuses can be assessed along three dimensions of locus (internal/external), control (controllable/uncontrollable), and stability (stable/unstable). A person responsible for a failure is more likely to produce a perceived “good” excuse (external, uncontrollable, unstable) than a “bad” one (internal, controllable, and stable); however, the research upon which this finding is based has only been tested with participants lacking prior relationships. As such, our understanding of this phenomenon could be blurred. In this study, participants (224 women, 174 men, Mage = 19.6 yr) were apportioned into relationally close and distant conditions and asked to produce an excuse for a failure in which they were the causal element. Three dependent variables of locus, control, and stability were tested. As predicted, participants in the distant condition produced more perceived “good” excuses than those in the close condition.