We need to look briefly, therefore, into attribution theory.

We are all psychologists now. We all know that it is our unconscious which drafts our perceptions, our beliefs and our behaviours. What seems to us to be truth is a construct of our unconscious mind, much affected during its construction by our limbic systems and affect. We function in a virtual world, a construct assembled in and by our unconscious. Constructs, though, are constructs. They are not real, but merely representations of ‘reality’. Usually they are accurate (or at least seem to work well) but sometimes they are inaccurate, and sometimes they are highly inaccurate. Our perceptions of ‘reality’ are, in other words, sometimes plain ‘wrong’ and may even be flamboyantly so. It is in our unconscious, which is much affected by our affective state, that our perceptions of the reasons for our own performance are constructed, for example our beliefs about the reasons for our success or failure at literacy acquisition. These are our all-important attributions; they are mental constructs and may be false. They may also be maladaptive. (Adaptive is a term from biology. Something which is adaptive supports an organism, for example in surviving, prospering and so, ultimately, in reproducing; something which is maladaptive does precisely the reverse, undermining, enervating and debilitating.)

Attributions have three axes, according to Weiner (1980); internal or external; stable or unstable; controllable or uncontrollable. Are the causes of, say, literacy failure perceived as inherent to the student or as arising from circumstance? Literacy ability can be seen as internal (an innate personal property) or external (the quality of parenting or teaching, for example). Are the causes stable or unstable? (Mental ability is seen as relatively stable, for example, whereas the ability to ski is not - take lessons and you improve.) And are the causes controllable or not? (Effort, for example, is generally controllable, whereas available educational provision may not be.) And attributions, however real or unreal they may be, have consequences. Attributing literacy performance, for example, to an internal, unstable but controllable cause (like not putting in the effort) will have a radically different effect on subsequent motivation and performance than will attributing it to an internal, stable and uncontrollable cause (an innate deficit like ‘dyslexia’, for example). This is inevitable. It is also insidious; seldom consciously understood.

…pupils who tend to attribute success to internal, mainly stable and controllable causes and who attribute failure to internal-unstable-controllable causes, tend to exhibit adaptive, mastery-oriented behaviour. That is they tend to approach rather than avoid achievement tasks, tend to persist in the face of failure and tend to perform achievement tasks with greater intensity. Pupils who tend to attribute success to external causes and failure to internal-stable-uncontrollable causes show a very different pattern. These pupils tend to exhibit maladaptive, helpless achievement behaviour. That is they tend to avoid achievement tasks, tend to give up in the face of failure and do not perform achievement tasks with great intensity. (Bar-Tal 1980 p. 211.)

I have already confessed my inability to tackle hardcore statistical theory with any joy or belief. (Can you learn that stuff from books?) This is at least partly learned helplessness induced by an irrational emotional response to considerable failure. Intellectually, of course, I believe my brain is perfectly capable of basic statistical theory but that is because I have confidence in the normality of my own intellect - many adult literacy students are less certain. I recently also became aware of this same emotionally mediated effect when reading about the reading wars in a chapter of a major text. What I read was full of monsters like ‘conceptual relativism’, ‘epistemic relativism’, ‘critical fallibilism’, ‘coherentist’ and ‘constructivist’ (the last two apparently being the same creature!). I realised that I was dealing with the argument much less well than I expected (was drowning, in fact) and that this was because I was powerfully intimidated by the terminological monsters. I was reduced from confident master of literacy into anxious victim of a species of illiteracy. My intellect told me (when I used it) that the problem was over-egging of the jargon, but my emotions told me, quite loudly, that I was personally inept. I began attributing considerable incompetence to my own literacy and intellect. I failed to attribute any of my difficulty to the unnecessarily arcane jargon. My attributions were maladaptive and my reading behaviour was fundamentally altered while reading this section. My eyes slid around the page almost uncontrollably. I could not hold them to the work for any length of time. In the end I had to read the passage aloud, and even then skip a good deal of it. I have recovered now, but then I am an extremely confident literate (under normal conditions). Reading must often be this traumatic, and difficult, however, for less literate people.