Age differences in attributions to causality: implications for intellectual assessment

Negative attributions and failure expectations held by elderly test-takers may be confounding ability-extraneous variables and thus may contribute to lowered intellectual performance. The present study, using the contextualistic model, examined these confounds through experimental manipulation of causal attributions to test outcome in younger and older individuals. Eighty females (40 elderly; 40 younger) were exposed to noncontingent failure (unsolvable test items) and received a verbal massage stating their failure and relating it to either their ability, effort, or no cause. A fourth group exposed to identical failure was not given feedback. Subjects in all four groups for both ages were then administered three solvable intelligence sub-tests: Reasoning, Hidden Patterns, and Paper Folding. Older subjects exhibited significantly lower success expectations and performed more poorly on all three tests. Also, older and younger subjects, in the absence of suggested causal ascription, showed differential performance in the Paper Folding Test. Younger subjects with no experimenter-given cause for failure exhibited facilitation of performance while older subjects' performances, under the same conditions, showed deficits. Results are discussed in reference to attributional style research and the contextualistic viewpoint.