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In two closely related experiments, college student subjects were instructed to choose between a drug that allegedly interfered with performance and a drug that allegedly enhanced performance. This choice was the main dependent measure of the experiment. The drug choice intervened between work on soluble or insoluble problems and a promised retest on similar problems. In Experiment 1, all subjects received success feedback after their initial problem-solving attempts, thus creating one condition in which the success appeared to be accidental (noncontingent on performance) and one in which the success appeared to be contingent on appropriate knowledge. Males in the noncontingent-success condition were alone in preferring the performance-inhibiting drug, presumably because they wished to externalize probable failure on the retest. The predicted effect, however, did not hold for female subjects. Experiment 2 replicated the unique preference shown by males after noncontingent success and showed the critical importance of success feedback.

Explores the hypothesis that alcohol use and underachievement may serve as strategies to externalize the causation of poor performance and to internalize the causation of good performance. Such a strategy may be prominently used especially by those who have a precarious but not entirely negative sense of self-competence. The etiology of this strategic preference may follow either of two scenarios. The child may attach desperate importance to this competence image because competence is the condition for deserving parental love. Or the child may have been rewarded for accidental attributes or performances that do not predict future success, thus leaving him in a position of one who has reached a status he fears he cannot maintain through his own control. The linkage of alcohol appeal to underachievement strategies is stressed; both are seen as expressions of the same overconcern with competence.

This article examines the attributional error of overestimating dispositions as a cause of behavior, with reference to the attitude attribution paradigm. Earlier experiments were open to criticism on artifactual grounds, but the overattribution-to-persons tendency has proved to be a remarkably robust and easily replicated phenomenon. It can be undermined or overcome when the perceived constraints on behavior are extreme or when instructions specifically set the subject to consider the importance of situational factors. The functional significance of the attributional error is not clear, though it probably stems from a perceptually generated hypothesis that is insufficiently adjusted for contextual constraint.