MANAGEMENT & ORGANIZATIONS “I wanna thank me”:


Reputational consequences of attribution locus depend on


ÖVÜL SEZER ASSISTANT PROFESSOR


Cornell Peter and Stephanie Nolan School of Hotel Administration,


Cornell SC Johnson College of Business Cornell University


outcome valence Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 120, September 2025 LINK TO PAPER


Co-authors • Övül Sezer


Assistant Professor, Cornell Peter and Stephanie Nolan School of Hotel Administration, Cornell SC Johnson College of Business, Cornell University


• Deming Wang, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China • Ignazio Ziano, Geneva School of Economics and Management, University of Geneva, Switzerland


Summary People can attribute any outcome to either internal or external sources. For


example, a basketball player can blame a game loss on internal sources, such as their own lack of effort or skill, or external sources, such as their teammates’ mistakes or bad luck. People, particularly those from Western cultures, often explain others’ successes and failures by attributing them to different causes than they use to explain their own outcomes. Specifically, they tend to see others’ behaviors as stemming from internal causes such as personality traits while viewing their own behaviors as more influenced by external causes such as situational factors.


Previous research finds that people use different strategies when communicating success vs. failure. An important yet understudied aspect of outcome attributions is how people who adopt different attribution strategies are perceived by others. Research in this domain has largely been limited to the consideration of positive outcomes. For instance, hiding success and “humblebragging” both appear to be judged unfavorably. For example, when communicating a success, they underestimate the audience’s acceptance of internal attribution and convey their own effort less than observers would prefer. And for group endeavours, the way in which credit and blame are distributed appears to depend on outcome valence: after a success, people praise many others, but after a failure, they blame only a few people.


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| RESEARCH WITH IMPACT: CORNELL SC JOHNSON COLLEGE OF BUSINESS • 2025 EDITION


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