Predicting academic self‐handicapping in different age groups: The role of personal achievement goals and social goals

Background. Academic self‐handicapping refers to the use of impediments to successful performance on academic tasks. Previous studies have shown that it is related to personal achievement goals. A performance goal orientation is a positive predictor of self‐handicapping, whereas a task goal orientation is unrelated to self‐handicapping. Aims. The aim of this study was to examine the relationship between academic self‐handicapping, goal orientations (task, performance‐approach, performance‐avoidance), social goals, future consequences and achievement in mathematics. An additional aim was to investigate grade‐level and gender differences in relation to academic self‐handicapping. Sample. Participants were 702 upper elementary, junior and senior high school students with approximately equal numbers of girls and boys. Results. There were no grade‐level or gender differences as regards the use of self‐handicapping. The correlations among the variables revealed that, when the whole sample was considered, self‐handicapping was positively related to performance goal orientations and pleasing significant others and negatively to achievement in mathematics. The results of hierarchical regression analysis showed that, in upper elementary and junior high schools, the association between achievement in mathematics and self‐handicapping was mediated by performance‐avoidance goals. In senior high school, only task goal orientation was a negative predictor of self‐handicapping.     

Learning to play golf under different goal conditions: their effects on irrelevant thoughts and on subsequent control strategies

Volitional and self‐handicapping theories suggest that individuals use various strategies to energize the maintenance and the enactment of goals. We placed 32 golfers (16 men and 16 women) alternately in four golf proficiency conditions using a randomized complete block design: task involvement, learning, achievement, and one‐on‐one competition goals. As expected, the path analysis showed that one‐on‐one competition goals generate irrelevant thoughts (anxiety, threat to self‐esteem, distraction) as well as the subsequent bringing into play of control strategies (emotional control, attentional control, self‐handicapping strategies). Conversely, task involvement goals not only exclude intrusive thoughts but hinder the implementation of control strategies. These results are discussed in terms of the attentional processes induced by motivational goals and their subsequent volitional and self‐handicapping strategies. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Conceptions of criminal and delinquent acts

We estimate a series of multivariate logistic regression models specifying the effects of gender and other variables on the initiation and escalation of alcohol and other substance use/abuse in a sample of young adults from a general population. After controlling for race, ethnicity, father's education, and a tendency to over‐ or underendorse statements, effects of gender on circumstances surrounding initiation/escalation of binge drinking, marijuana use, and use of other illicit drugs were observed to be congruent with the literature on gender‐related sociodevelopmental processes and empirical studies of the circumstances surrounding substance use. Among substance users/abusers, gender was implicated in self‐reports of the relevance of peer influence, needs to enhance self‐importance and a sense of power, conflictive consequences, sensation‐seeking, and reduction of distress in the processes surrounding initiation and escalation of use.     

Dysfunctional anticipatory thoughts and the self‐handicapping strategy

Self‐handicapping is an anticipatory self‐protective strategy in which individuals create or claim obstacles to success prior to an important performance to excuse potential failure. The present research sought in four studies to document the anticipatory nature of self‐handicapping, examining the role of prefactual (“what if …?”) thoughts in this strategy. Individuals prone to self‐handicap were more likely to generate prefactuals, identifying ways to undermine their performance. Moreover, inducing individuals to consider these thoughts increased self‐handicapping behavior, whereas focusing individuals on ways to improve their performance actually reduced self‐handicapping behavior. Implications of this work for understanding the cognitive processes underlying self‐handicapping behavior and for interventions that seek to minimize this self‐defeating behavior are discussed. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Not just who you are,but who you were before: Social identification,identity incompatibility,and performance‐undermining learning behaviour in higher education

The current study builds on links between academic social identification and learning behaviours and extends these models by also considering the level of compatibility between the student identity and the pre‐existing self‐concept. This is a crucial extension, in the context of broadening access to higher education and fostering belonging and learning in nontraditional students. Further, where previous work focused on learning behaviours that enhance performance (often learning approaches), we also consider performance‐undermining behaviours (self‐handicapping and procrastination). These effects are explored in survey responses from an undergraduate student sample (N = 121) from UK and broader European samples. Participants were predominantly female (69%) and native English speakers (87%). Three models of the relationships between these variables were tested using Mplus. Results indicate that performance‐undermining behaviours are predicted by identity incompatibility, but not identification level; deep learning approaches are predicted by identification level, but not identity incompatibility. This provides first evidence that identity incompatibility is not just a moderator of the identification‐learning relationships but, in fact, a separate identity process for consideration. We also present initial evidence for a mediation model, where in the identity variables are related to procrastination and self‐handicapping via learning approaches.     

Self‐Handicapping: On the Self‐Perpetuating Nature of Defensive Behavior

The term self‐handicapping was introduced by Jones and Berglas (1978 ) to refer to the creation of barriers to successful performance for the purpose of controlling attributions about the self. In the event of failure, attributions to lack of ability are diminished or discounted because of the handicap and, in the event of success, attributions to ability are enhanced or augmented because of the handicap. This article reviews over 25 years of research on self‐handicapping. A process model is presented in which individual differences in goals and concerns dynamically interact with situational threats to elicit self‐handicapping behavior which produces consequences that perpetuate the use of the behavior in future situations.     

Disengaging from Workplace Relationships

A randomly‐selected sample of 306 adults employed full‐time rated how likely individuals would be to use various communication strategies (cost escalation, depersonalization, and state‐of‐the‐relationship talk) to disengage from a workplace relationship (with the target of the deteriorations being a supervisor, a peer coworker, or a subordinate employee) in 5 different scenarios. The results indicated that strategy use likelihood scores varied little as a function of the hierarchical level of the target. Likelihood of strategy use scores did vary by deterioration event; however, that accounted for little variance in strategy scores. In general, the participants perceived individuals were most likely to use depersonalization and least likely to use cost escalation to decrease closeness in a workplace relationship.     

Adaptive but non-optimal visual search behavior with highlighted displays

Previous research [Fisher, D. L., & Tan, K. C. (1989). Visual displays: The highlighting paradox. Human Factors, 31(1), 17–30] suggested that making certain items visually salient, or highlighting, can speed performance in visual search tasks. But interface designers cannot always anticipate users’ intended targets, and highlighting non-target items can lead to performance decrements. An experiment presented suggests that people attend to highlighting less than what an algebraic visual search model of highlighted displays [Fisher, D. L., Coury, B. G., Tengs, T. O., & Duffy, S. A. (1989). Minimizing the time to search visual displays: The role of highlighting. Human Factors, 31(2), 167–182] predicts. Users adjust their visual search strategies by probability-matching to their visual environment. An ACT-R [Anderson, J. R., Bothell, D., Byrne, M. D., Douglass, S., Lebiere, C., & Quin, Y. (2004). An integrated theory of the mind. Psychological Review, 111, 1036–1060] model reproduced the major effects of the experiment and suggests that learning in this task occurs at very small cognitive and time scales.     

CLIMATE CHANGE AND THE APOCALYPTIC IMAGINATION: SCIENCE,FAITH, AND ECOLOGICAL RESPONSIBILITY

The use of apocalyptic and post apocalyptic narratives to interpret the risk of environmental degradation and climate change has been criticized for (1) too often making erroneous predictions on the basis of too little evidence, (2) being ineffective to motivate change, (3) leading to a discounting of present needs in the face of an exaggerated threat of impending catastrophe, and (4) relying on a pre‐modern, Judeo‐Christian mode of constructing reality. Nevertheless, “Apocalypse,” whether understood in its technical sense as “revelation” or in its popular sense as “end of the world as we know it,” remains a powerful way of creatively reimagining the world and of introducing questions of value and significance into discussions of climate change.     

Effects of early experience on children's recognition of facial displays of emotion

The present research examines visual perception of emotion in both typical and atypical development. To examine the processes by which perceptual mechanisms become attuned to the contingencies of affective signals in the environment, the authors measured the sequential, content-based properties of feature detection in emotion recognition processes. To evaluate the role of experience, they compared typically developing children with physically abused children, who were presumed to have experienced high levels of threat and hostility. As predicted, physically abused children accurately identified facial displays of anger on the basis of less sensory input than did controls, which suggests that physically abused children have facilitated access to representations of anger. The findings are discussed in terms of experiential processes in perceptual learning.     

Integration of information from multiple element displays

This experiment examined the processing of information from multiple element visual displays, using techniques derived from the theory of signal detectability. The method allows one to specify how observers integrate information from individual elements of a display. The experiment tested numerical and graphical displays having different display sizes, durations, and arrangements of elements. Observer performance increased with the number, m, of display elements, but at less than the ideal √m rate. Observer performance was consistent with a model of information integration constrained by internal noise. Linear arrays of elements resulted in better performance than did square arrays. Graphically coded elements resulted in better performance than did numerical elements. Observer decision weighting of element information from graphical displays was approximately uniform across spatial position, but the weighting of information from numerical displays was concentrated on elements near the fixation point.     

Wayfinding: The effects of large displays and 3-D perception

Large displays and stereopsis have been shown to improve performance in several virtual navigation tasks. In the present research, we sought to determine whether wayfinding could benefit from these factors. Participants were tested in a virtual town. There were three viewing conditions: a desktop, a large screen, and a large screen on which the virtual environment was viewed in three dimensions (3-D) using polarized glasses. Participants explored the town and had to remember the location of several landmarks. Their memory of the layout of the town was tested by asking them to navigate from one landmark to another, taking the shortest route possible. All groups performed equally well in terms of the distance traveled to target locations. From this result, we concluded that large displays and 3-D perception do not significantly contribute to wayfinding. Thus, experimental paradigms and training programs that utilize wayfinding are as valuable when administered on standard desktops as on more sophisticated and costly equipment and do not induce simulator sickness as large displays tend to do.     

Flank transparency: transparent filters seen in dynamic two-color displays

Flank transparency is the perception of a colored transparent filter evoked by apparent-motion displays containing as few as two colors. Displays of flank transparency contain a random array of line segments placed on a uniform background. Small flanks are added to the line segments if the segments fall in the interior of a moving virtual shape, such as a virtual disk. This leads to the perception of a colored transparent disk with well-defined boundaries moving over the array of lines. Current qualitative and quantitative models of luminance and color conditions for perceptual transparency do not account for flank transparency as they require displays containing at least three different colors.     

Defensive Pessimism,Anxiety, and the Complexity of Evaluating Self‐Regulation

Defensive pessimism is a motivated cognitive strategy that helps people manage their anxiety and pursue their goals. Individuals who use defensive pessimism set low expectations, and play through extensive mental simulations of possible outcomes as they prepare for goal‐relevant tasks and situations. Research on a variety of phenomena, from self‐handicapping to stereotype threat, demonstrates the potential effectiveness of defensive pessimism as a self‐regulation strategy. Review of this research provides an illustration of the complexity of self‐regulation efforts, because understanding how and why defensive pessimism works requires an integrated understanding the role of traits, motivations, and self structures within the individual, the resultant goals toward which strategies are directed, and the particular constraints of different situations and cultural contexts.     

Inferring task performance and confidence from displays of eye movements

Eye movements reveal what is at the center of people's attention, which is assumed to coincide with what they are thinking about. Eye-movement displays (visualizations of a person's fixations superimposed onto the stimulus, for example, as dots or circles) might provide useful information for diagnosing that person's performance. However, making inferences about a person's task performance based on eye-movement displays requires substantial interpretation. Using graph-comprehension tasks, we investigated to what extent observers (N = 46) could make accurate inferences about a performer's multiple-choice task performance (i.e., chosen answer), confidence, and competence from displays of that person's eye movements. Observers' accuracy when judging which answer the performer chose was above chance level and was higher for displays reflecting confident performance. Observers were also able to infer performers' confidence from the eye-movement displays; moreover, their own task performance and perceived similarity with the performer affected their judgments of the other's competence.     

Mutual Funds Efficiency Measurement under Financial and Social Responsibility Criteria

Socially responsible investors pursue financial as well as nonfinancial goals. Whereas the role of financial criteria in investment decisions is well understood, much less is known on the influence of social responsibility considerations. This work seeks to integrate both dimensions within a data envelopment analysis framework consistent with second‐order stochastic dominance efficiency. We compare the performance of conventional versus socially responsible mutual funds on an empirical data set. Our data do not support the conjecture that conventional mutual funds exhibit superior overall performance. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Causal uncertainty,claimed and behavioural self‐handicapping

Background: Causal uncertainty beliefs involve doubts about the causes of events, and arise as a consequence of non‐contingent evaluative feedback: feedback that leaves the individual uncertain about the causes of his or her achievement outcomes. Individuals high in causal uncertainty are frequently unable to confidently attribute their achievement outcomes, experience anxiety in achievement situations and as a consequence are likely to engage in self‐handicapping behaviour. Aims: Accordingly, we sought to establish links between trait causal uncertainty, claimed and behavioural self‐handicapping. Sample: Participants were N=72 undergraduate students divided equally between high and low causally uncertain groups. Method: We used a 2 (causal uncertainty status: high, low) × 3 (performance feedback condition: success, non‐contingent success, non‐contingent failure) between‐subjects factorial design to examine the effects of causal uncertainty on achievement behaviour. Following performance feedback, participants completed 20 single‐solution anagrams and 12 remote associate tasks serving as performance measures, and 16 unicursal tasks to assess practice effort. Participants also completed measures of claimed handicaps, state anxiety and attributions. Results: Relative to low causally uncertain participants, high causally uncertain participants claimed more handicaps prior to performance on the anagrams and remote associates, reported higher anxiety, attributed their failure to internal, stable factors, and reduced practice effort on the unicursal tasks, evident in fewer unicursal tasks solved. Conclusions: These findings confirm links between trait causal uncertainty and claimed and behavioural self‐handicapping, highlighting the need for educators to facilitate means by which students can achieve surety in the manner in which they attribute the causes of their achievement outcomes.     

Effects of role model deservingness on overcoming performance deficits induced by stereotype threat

Previous research has shown that exposure to successful role models can restore performance that had been impaired by stereotype threat, and that some role models are more effective than others. The present research examined the effects of role model deservingness on women's mathematics test performance after being placed under stereotype threat. In Experiment 1, a woman who attained success by herself (deserved) proved a more effective role model than an equally likable and successful woman whose success was handed to her (not deserved). In Experiment 2, women role models proved more effective at combating stereotype threat when their successes were attributable to internal‐stable (deserved) than external‐unstable (not deserved) causes, an effect that was partially mediated by reduction in extra‐task thinking. The results are seen as having implications for theories of stereotype threat and causal attribution. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Explaining White Opposition to Black Political Leadership: The Role of Fear of Racial Favoritism

Despite the election of America's first Black president, most non‐Hispanic Whites continue to oppose Black political leadership. The conventional explanation for White opposition is sheer racial prejudice, yet the available empirical evidence for this theory is inconsistent. I test an alternative theory that Whites perceive Black political leaders as a threat to their group's interests. Using a new survey measure and nationally representative panel data covering the 2008, 2010, and 2012 U.S. elections, I find that a majority of Whites perceive Black elected officials as likely to favor Blacks over Whites. Moreover, fear of racial favoritism predicts support for Barack Obama in both cross‐sectional models and fixed‐effects models of within‐person change, controlling for negative racial stereotypes. I replicate these findings using a separate cross‐sectional survey fielded after the 2014 election that controls for racial resentment. Collectively, these results suggest that perceptions of conflicting group interests—and not just prejudice—drive White opposition to Black political leadership.