Attribution and Motivation

Hello, my dear friend!

When studying one of the modules in social psychology, I found a very interesting lecture, which dealt with motivation and attribution.

From how we explain the reasons for our own successes and failures, it depends on how much we are motivated in the future to achieve some goals that are important to us.

European researcher Bernard Weiner found that people with high motivation tend to explain the results of their activities (both successes and failures) with their own efforts. People with low motivation tend to explain the results of their activities with external factors. They tend to explain failure simply as unlucky, and tend to explain successes as external, uncontrollable factors, for example, circumstances have developed successfully.

Bernard Weiner’s attribution theory has become one of the key theories of motivation because it shows how the motivation for our future activities depends on how we process feedback about success or failure.

From here comes the division of people into optimists and pessimists:

Pessimists and optimists have mirror-opposite ways of explaining successes and failures.

And now let's recall my posts in which I showed several videos of my public speech, and see who I am - an otimist or a pessimist :)

In general, when describing my speeches, I didn't scold myself and didn't consider my unsuccessful performances as something logical. Each time I said that I could do better, that I would learn to speak correctly and calmly, and with every speech I corrected my mistakes. If I experienced setbacks, then I understood that I was just starting to learn how to speak and make public speeches.

After such a discussion, can I call myself an optimist? What do you think?

Who do you consider yourself - an optimist or a pessimist?