The Social Functions of Attributional Face Saving Tactics

Abstract

Examines how students manage their public image ("save face") in ways that promote social approval in the context of the classroom. The goal of these experiments was to investigate students' understanding of the impact of ability and effort attributions on teacher and peer approval. Ss were 4-8th graders in public school educational settings in the US and Finland. In sum, the initial experiments showed that by 4th grade, (1) students understand that low ability and lack of effort attributions affect teacher and peer approval, and (2) that they vary their own failure accounts in ways that are consistent with their beliefs regarding attribution-social response linkages. In addition, early adolescents were quite willing to convey to their peers and especially to their teachers that they had done poorly on an exam because they were not good at a subject. Furthermore, Finnish students were more likely to attribute their poor performance to low ability when dealing with liked teachers and peers, and least likely to to use this explanation when dealing with disliked individuals. It is concluded that portraying oneself as low in ability is clearly perceived to facilitate social approval. Thus, "face-saving" tactics may be more relationship saving than self-protecting. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)