According to Fritz Heider (1958), each of us, including ex-presidents, searches ceaselessly for ways to create meaning in our lives. Heider proposed that this process is guided by the principles of attribution theory, which means ascribing causes to our actions and to the actions of others. Clearly this is what Richard Nixon was doing in his resignation speech as president of the United States, trying to make comprehensible his questionable actions during the Watergate scandal. These same dynamics are also illustrated by the schoolchild who frets over a failing grade. Was failure the result of incompetency, he wonders, or the fault of the teacher for not better explaining the assignment?

Attribution theory is central to the topic of achievement motivation because in the early 1970s cognitive psychologists led by Bernard Weiner proposed a radical reinterpretation of Atkinson's need achievement model (Weiner, 1972,1974; Weiner et al., 1971). As will be recalled, Atkinson proposed emotional anticipation as the basic driving force behind all achievement behavior, and defined the motive to approach success as “a capacity to experience pride in accomplishment.” Weiner transformed Atkinson's definition with an intriguing substitution: “a capacity for perceiving success as caused by internal factors, particularly effort” (Weiner et al., 1971, p. 96).