Causal attributions for collaborative public speaking presentations in college classes.

The present study applied attribution theory in examining how college students interpret success and failure for themselves and their partners in collaborative presentations. Questionnaires were completed by 174 students based on a 2 (positive vs. negative feedback) x 2 (self vs. other) design.

The results revealed that people who received positive feedback made similar attributions about themselves and their presentation partners. However, as predicted, people attributed their own poor performance less to internal causes and more to the nature of the assignment than they did their partners' poor performance. Explanations of the findings and the implications for future research are discussed.

Keywords: Public Speaking; Attributions; Group Work

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While group work is common in most academic circumstances, working in groups can be a challenging experience for most people (Forsyth & Kelley, 1994). One of the biggest challenges is being able to fairly and objectively evaluate everyone's contribution to the group. There has been considerable research in the area of attributions for group work as a whole, but the majority of studies focus on the cognitive aspects of attributions (e.g., Spitzberg, 2001). As a result, there has been less attribution research from a communication perspective (e.g., Dunbar & Allen, 2003; Manusov & Harvey, 2001). The present study considers the actor-observer bias in collective communication endeavors, focusing specifically on the causal attributions for public speaking in the classroom; that is, how do people interpret success and failure for themselves and their collaborators in group presentations?

The assessment of individuals' attributions of responsibility for performance on public speaking presentations is important for three reasons: First, understanding the differences in people's attributions for their own contribution to a successful/failing group performance and for their partners' might help people to properly evaluate themselves and others. A fair and objective explanation of success and failure in academic group tasks for oneself might provide students and others with reliable information about their strengths, weaknesses, and needed improvements. Second, exploring why people make different attributions for their own and their partners' success/ failure in group tasks might help to reduce interpersonal conflict and promote positive interpersonal relations in classroom and workplace groups. Third, public speaking presentations suggest a range of possible attributions that people might make to explain a performance (e.g., audience behaviors) that does not generalize well from previous studies of group task attributions.

Attribution theory focuses on the interpretive processes associated with laypersons' explanations of events, especially their perceptions of personal causality (Canary & Spitzberg, 1990; Manusov & Harvey, 2001; Seibold & Spitzberg, 1982). However, research based on attribution theory has demonstrated several perceptual biases relevant to interpersonal interaction (Bradbury & Fincham, 1990; Canary & Spitzberg, 1990). The attribution literature has found the self-serving bias to be a strong and general tendency, which is displayed by individuals taking credit for successes and denying responsibility for their failures (Arkin & Shepperd, 1990). This typical self-serving pattern of attributions has also been found in group-performance situations (Ross & Sicoly, 1979; Schlenker, 1975). Also, Bradbury and Fincham (1990) found that during conflict episodes, negative outcomes tend to be attributed to the partner, whereas positive outcomes tend to be attributed to the self. Further, research in a variety of situations demonstrates that attributors tend to overestimate the extent to which behavior is caused by stable personal traits and underestimate the role of unstable situational factors, referred to as the fundamental attribution error (Ross, 1977; Sillars, 1980). In addition to the self-serving bias and the fundamental attribution error, attributions might also vary due to the actor-observer bias--that is, actors tend to attribute their own actions to external events while they attribute others' actions to those individuals' personal characteristics (Heider, 1958; Jones & Nisbett, 1971).

In summary, most studies of causal attributions have focused on individual performance or group performances in competitive situations rather than cooperative situations (i.e., Snyder, Stephan, & Rosenfield, 1976; Stephan, Rosenfield, & Stephan, 1976). Also, studies of attributions for group performance largely have been based on experiments pairing individuals with strangers to work on tasks of varying realism and generalizability to actual academic assignments (e.g., Arkin & Maruyama, 1979; Forsyth & Kelley, 1994; McArthur, 1972). The present study is based on people's accounts of actual events from their academic lives, assessing individuals' attributions of responsibility for performance on public speaking presentations. Applying attribution theory and the fundamental attribution error to the context of small group performance, the following hypotheses were proposed:

H1: People will attribute their own contributions to a successful group presentation more to internal reasons and less to external reasons than they will their partners' contributions.

H2: People will attribute their own contributions to an unsuccessful group presentation less to internal reasons and more to external reasons than they will their partners' contributions.

Method

Questionnaire Construction

Students enrolled in lower division communication classes at a large urban university were polled to generate a comprehensive range of attributions that students might make for their performances on public speaking assignments. The students worked in 32 small groups of two to four students each to generate lists of possible reasons for both a positive and a negative reaction to a group performance. Students reported on a time when they gave a presentation with a partner and got feedback (either positive or negative) from the teacher. The answers were grouped into two categories: internal factors (i.e., ability, effort) and external factors (i.e., task difficulty, situational reasons, luck). A 38-item questionnaire was generated based on these answers. (1)

Participants

The study was announced in the classes of professors who had agreed to award extra credit to students who participated. One hundred and seventy-four students (68 males, 105 females, 1 missing data) enrolled in upper division communication courses at a university were recruited for this study. Although participants were solicited from the same university, none of the participants in the main study had taken part in the questionnaire construction. Participants ranged in age from 18 to 51, with a mean age of 23.12 (SD = 4.64). The majority of the individuals identified themselves as 'Euro-American' (45.9%), with 6.5% 'African American,' 9.4% 'Latino American,' 14.1% 'Asian American,' 0.6% 'Native American,' and 23.5% 'Other'. (2) More than half of the sample reported their class standing as 'Seniors' (53.4%), 41.4% as 'Juniors,' 4.0% as 'Sophomores,' and 1.1% as 'Graduate Students.' The presentation that the participants recalled for the study happened from 0 to 60 months ago (M = 5.99, SD = 8.12). Less than half of the sample reported the grade of their group presentation as 'A' (39.8%), 39.8% as 'B,' 19.9% as 'C,' and 0.6% as 'D.' The majority of the individuals reported that they gave the group presentation for a communication class (76.8%), with 23.2% reporting a presentation for a noncommunication class.

Procedure

Participants recalled a particular time when they gave a presentation with a partner. Questionnaires were based on a 2 (positive vs. negative feedback) x 2 (self vs. other) design. Items were worded positively in the positive feedback conditions (e.g., 'I was an effective communicator') and negatively in the negative feedback conditions (e.g., 'I was not an effective communicator'), and items wording referred either to T or 'My partner.' Participants were randomly given each of the four versions of the questionnaires. Approximately one quarter (25.9%) of the participants assessed the reasons they believed they contributed to the positive outcome of a pair presentation themselves; 23.6% of the participants assessed the reasons they believed they contributed to the negative outcome of a pair presentation themselves; 24.1% of the participants rated the reasons they believed their partners contributed to the positive outcome of a pair presentation; and the final 26.4% of the participants rated the reasons they believed their partners contributed to the negative outcome of a pair presentation.

Measurement

We reversed scores on items of the negatively worded conditions to make them compatible for analysis with the positively worded conditions. (3) Both Bartlett's test of sphericity, [chi square] (703) = 3462.38, p < .001, and the Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin measure of sampling adequacy (.84) suggested that the items were factorable. The 38 attribution items thus were submitted to an exploratory factor analysis (principal components) using varimax rotation. Factors contributing at least 5% unique variance were retained, and the .60/.40 criteria for primary and secondary loadings were used. Items that failed to meet these criteria were dropped. A model retaining 21 items and accounting for 62.1% of the variance yielded four factors. While the internal attributions items all loaded together on the internal causes factor (9 items, [alpha] = .87 for positive feedback conditions, [alpha] = .92 for negative feedback conditions), three external attribution factors emerged: audience (four items, positive feedback [alpha] = .88, negative feedback [alpha] = .77), circumstances (five items, positive feedback [alpha] = .72, negative feedback [alpha] = .76), and assignment (three items, positive feedback [alpha] = .60, negative feedback [alpha] = .61). These items' means and standard deviations, as well as their factor loadings, can be found in Table 1.

Results

The alpha level for the t-tests was adjusted (.05/8 = .006) to account for the number of tests between the two hypotheses. Hypothesis 1 predicted that people would attribute their own contributions to a successful collaborative presentation more to internal reasons and less to external reasons than they would their partners' contributions. An independent samples t-test was conducted for each of the four attribution factors (one internal and three external) to test this relationship. None of the tests revealed any significant difference between people assessing their own contributions to the project and those assessing their presentation partners' contribution when reporting about an incident when they received positive feedback on a collaborative presentation: internal causes, t(84) = 1.24, n.s.; audience, t(85) = 0.60, n.s.; circumstances, t(85) = 0.34, n.s.; assignment, t(85) = 0.65, n.s. Therefore, Hypothesis 1 was not supported.

Hypothesis 2 predicted that when individuals received negative feedback, they would attribute their own contributions to the presentation less to internal reasons and more to external reasons than they would their partners' contributions. Recall that items for the negative feedback performance scenarios were inversely worded (e.g., I did not put 100% effort into the presentation'). An independent samples t-test revealed that people were less likely, t(84) = -6.32, p < .001, to attribute their own poor performances (M = 33.21, SD = 7.77) to internal causes as compared to their partners' performance (M = 22.80, SD = 7.51) (higher scores reflect less internal attribution). When asked about external causes for their group's negative feedback, they were more likely to blame the assignment, t(83) = 2.70, p < .005, as a factor in their own poor performance (per-item M = 10.28, SD = 2.64) than in their partner's performances (per-item M = 11.60, SD = 2.19) (higher scores reflect less external attribution). No significant differences between self and other attributions emerged for the external attribution factors of audience, t(85) = -0.88, n.s., or circumstances, t(85) = -1.16, n.s. These findings partially support Hypothesis 2.

Discussion

These results, at least in part, provide support for attribution theory. In particular, our findings were consistent with the fundamental attribution error, which predicts that individuals tend to overestimate personal or internal causes of other's behavior and to underestimate the influence of external constraints on other's behavior. In this case, when students received negative feedback on a collaborative group presentation, they were more likely to blame their partner's failures on the dispositional factors or other internal factors such as their partner's lack of organization, general knowledge, or presentation skills than the students were for themselves. On the other hand, students were likely to see the assignment itself, especially how difficult it was to research and present, and the teacher's grading of it as more responsible for their own unsuccessful performance than their partner's. This is clearly evidence for the self-serving bias documented in other attribution research (e.g., Arkin & Maruyama, 1979).

But why did students working on a collaborative presentation not exhibit self-serving biases for a successful outcome? One possibility is that people generally expect success rather than failure (Miller & Ross, 1975). When the outcomes match their expectations, they are not as motivated to identify discrete causes of their successful performances. They do not spend as much time ruminating about a successful performance as a negative performance and so do not need to exert much cognitive energy identifying the causes of the successful performance. On the contrary, if the group fails, individuals must identify the cause so as to avoid failure in the future; but at the same time, they are more sensitive to damage to their egos and thus seek out mitigating causes rather than blaming themselves. This is similar to the logic often used to explain why the divorce rate for second marriages is even higher than that of first marriages (Popenoe, 2002): Because people are reluctant to attribute their marriage's failure to their own disposition or personal failings, they blame their partner or external factors and do not change anything about themselves before remarrying. Similarly, students appear to seek causes for poor performance that absolve them of responsibility.

Another possible explanation for why the self-serving bias was not apparent for successful outcomes is that when the group succeeds, individuals' attributional largesse extends to their partners because enhancing the group would not affect self-protection, but in the case of negative feedback, individuals protect themselves by placing the blame squarely on their partner. As Forsyth and Kelley (1994) suggested, self-serving and group-serving attributions are not necessarily mutually exclusive processes. Members of a successful group can credit the entire team without underestimating their own personal contributions to the team effort. So when the group does well, a member can take pride in his or her group's work and share in the group's success.

Although the participants in this study used the assignment itself as a way to mitigate their own responsibility for the failure of the group, they did not seem to use the audience or the circumstances surrounding their presentation as external factors even though our focus groups identified those as possible explanations. Perhaps, as compared to the external factors in terms of audience and circumstances, the factors about the assignments are more subjective and artificial and therefore are more easily controlled or changed. In other words, students tend to see these factors (e.g., 'it was really noisy outside;' 'the audience was really not interested in our talk') as affecting both self and partner equally and so there is less opportunity to be self-serving. On the contrary, for relatively subjective factors, students have more freedom to make different interpretations for self and other.

It should be noted that participants were asked to recall actual feedback they had received on a presentation. There might have been difficulty remembering exactly what their professor said about a presentation that, for some students, was more than a semester earlier. Despite this restriction, this study makes a notable contribution by focusing specifically on attributions about real communication performances. While attribution theory has been widely used in studies from a psychological perspective, this study focuses on attributions about communicative performances to suggest a new direction for future attribution research. Specifically, public speaking presentation, as a typical communication behavior, suggests a range of possible attributions that people might make to explain a performance (e.g., audience behaviors) that diverge from previous studies of group task attributions. Examining causal attribution in public speaking circumstances might help speakers themselves, their audiences, and instructors make evaluations less subjectively and thoroughly.

On a practical level, our findings suggest that people working in a collaborative presentation are happy to share the wealth equally when receiving positive feedback, but scrutinize and assign blame more unequally (and perhaps inaccurately) when getting negative feedback. These findings might help teachers give more effective instructions for students in doing classroom presentations. On the one hand, teachers wishing to avoid such discrepant attributions might wish to clearly stipulate the reasons for a grade and the factors that they attended to when assigning it. This approach might minimize students' self-protective and fault-finding tendencies that can lead to group conflict and hinder the self reflection needed for personal growth. On the other hand, teachers' awareness of students' ego-defensive attributions might mirror their own self-serving attributions for students' performance. According to McAllister (1996), teachers might feel the need to distance themselves from a student's failure or take credit for success. One way to reduce the potential conflict between teacher and student, as Juvonen (1988) explained, is to encourage them to be aware of and communicate their attributions to each other. At this point, the present study might also help improve the teacher-student relationship.

Notes

[1] Our review of literature turned up no other measure that specifically assessed attribution about public speaking performances. Our focus was not on constructing a measure of attributions about public speaking for general use; instead, we intended to derive items from a sample of the same population so as to ensure that the items would have face validity for participants. We did not employ a systematic coding system of the raw items, since in effect we were allowing our participants to determine how the items were conceptually grouped through the latent variables that emerged in the factor analyses.

[2] It was apparent based on the high number of 'other' classifications that our ethnicity labels were not clear to respondents. Of the 40 students who marked their ethnicity as 'other,' 8 wrote in 'white,' 2 'Caucasian,' 7 'mixture,' 5 'Filipino,' 2 'Pacific Islander, and 1 each of 'Greek,' 'Arab American,' and 'Mexican,' while 8 left the line blank.

[3] Separate factor analyses for the positive and negative feedback conditions might have yielded factors with slightly different loadings; we computed them together so as to identify those core items on each factor that were consistent across both conditions, thus creating a uniform set of dependent variables for analyses.

References

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Li Luo (MA, California State University, Long Beach, 2004), Amy Bippus (PHD, University of Texas at Austin, 1999) is an Associate Professor of Communication Studies, and Norah Dunbar (PHD, University of Arizona, 2000), is an Associate Professor of Communication Studies at California State University, Long Beach. Correspondence to: Amy Bippus, Department of Communication Studies (MHB 717), California State University Long Beach, Long Beach, CA, 90840-2407, USA. Tel: (562) 985 7862. Email: abippus@csulb.edu

Table 1 Factor Items and Primary Loadings of the Reasons
for Presentation Performance

                                                   Factor Loadings

Factor Item                                   1      2      3      4

Internal causes (M = 31.54, SD = 8.68)

I (my partner) put 100% effort into the       .86    .05    .04   -.04
presentation

I (my partner) did my (his/her) fair share    .86   -.01   -.02    .07
in the group presentation

I (my partner) did adequate research for      .82   -.01   -.12    .15
the group presentation

I (my partner) was familiar with the topic    .78    .04   -.11    .20
of the presentation

I (my partner) spoke clearly during the       .78    .18    .05    .03
presentation

I (my partner) had good organizational        .77    .09    .05   -.02
ability so our presentation was well
organized

I (my partner) spent much time in             .77    .06   -.14    .06
preparing for the presentation

I (my partner) was knowledgeable on the       .76    .18   -.19    .01
topic of the presentation

I (my partner) used interesting ways of       .62    .39   -.05   -.05
presenting (e.g., humor, visual aids)

Audience (M = 14.47, SD = 3.26)

The audience was (in)attentive during the     .11    .84    .05    .14
presentation

The audience was interested in our            .12    .78    .08    .19
presentation

The audience was supportive of our            .04    .78    .09    .23
presentation

The audience responded positively to our      .14    .70    .27   -.03
presentation

Circumstances (M = 14.92, SD = 3.15)

I was lucky because I was in a good mood     -.07   .03     .74   -.12
when giving the presentation

The teacher was in a good mood when we       -.12   .08     .72    .36
were giving the presentation

The teacher liked me                         -.04   -.05    .69    .33

I was lucky because of the order our class   -.06   .15     .68   -.07
was in the class schedule

The quietness outside of the classroom       -.04   .19     .61    .11
made it easy for us to concentrate on our
presentation

Assignment (M = 11.79, SD = 2.37)

The topic was appropriate for a group         .08    .11    .25    .75
presentation

The teacher graded fairly                     .03    .10    .05    .73

The topic of the presentation was easy for    .16    .30    .01    .66
us to research

Note. Participants reporting on a situation in which they received
negative feedback responded to negatively worded versions of these
items. Their scores for each item were reversed for the factor
analysis.