Merito o fortuna? Il ruolo dell’origine sociale nelle attribuzioni di successo e insuccesso

This article uses 2009-10 INVALSI (National Institute for the Evaluation of Education and Training System) data to explore differences by social origin in the attributions of success and failure about school performance among middle school children (11-12 years old). The concept of “self-attribution” refers to the cognitive style (similar to the concept of “locus of control”) of individuals who find internal causes (i.e., within themselves) for success or failure, as opposed to external causes such as luck or help from the others. Given the advantages of self-attribution in terms of children’s school performance and later social outcomes, we study the role of social origin (parents’ education and occupation) in the transmission of this cognitive style that can be considered as one of the (many) channels through which social reproduction takes place. Our findings, based on multilevel regressions (pupils nested within classrooms), show that 1) higher social origin is actually linked to stronger self-attributing style, although its effects seem to be rather small; 2) the occupational component of social origin is weaker than the educational one; 3) the effect of social origin is contingent upon classroom level characteristics such as mean and dispersion of grades; specifically, social origin has stronger effect in heterogeneous and low performance classrooms. In general, children are socialized to internalise their merits and faults and classroom level variance is very low, suggesting that the “internality norm” is widely supported by teachers.