Psychology Blog

The New York Times has a thought-provoking article about self-handicapping - the attempt to actually make yourself worse at something. The idea is that if a bad performance is expected, some people actively try and handicap themselves before hand, for example by not practising or by getting drunk, so they have an excuse already lined up and can preserve their self-esteem when they don’t do very well.

I’m sure we’ve all heard about this sort of behaviour discussed anecdotally, but I didn’t realise it’s actually been quite well researched by psychologists since the late 1970s.

Some snippets from the article:

Psychologists have studied this sort of behavior since at least 1978, when Steven Berglas and Edward E. Jones used the phrase “self-handicapping” to describe students in a study who chose to take a drug that they were told would inhibit their performance on an exam (the drug was actually inert)…

Yet given the opportunity, and a good reason, most people will claim some handicap. In a paper [pdf] published last summer, Sean McCrea, a psychologist at the University of Konstanz in Germany, described experiments in which he manipulated participants’ scores on a variety of intelligence tests. In some, the subjects could choose to prepare before taking the test or could join the “no practice” group.

Sure enough, Dr. McCrea found that those told they got bad scores blamed a lack of practice, if they could, and that citing this handicap cushioned the blow to their self-confidence…

As a short-term strategy, self-handicapping is often no more than an exercise in self-delusion. Studies of college students have found that habitual handicappers — who skip a lot of classes; who miss deadlines; who don’t buy the textbook — tend to rate themselves in the top 10 percent of the class, though their grades slouch between C and D.

I wonder how this interacts with the effects of different types of praise and beliefs about intelligence, studied by psychologist Carol Dweck.

She has found that praising a child’s effort on a task (”you’ve worked really hard!”) has a motivating effect, whereas praising the child by attributing their success to a character trait (”you’re really clever”) caused them to become to be more distressed when they encounter failure and lead them to chose easier tasks afterwards.

Her work suggests this is because a belief that intelligence is flexible and effort-related, rather than a fixed character trait, actually makes us more motivated and helps us perform better as we don’t feel we are less intelligent if we fail.

It reflects a likely interaction between performance and self-esteem, mediated by beliefs about competence and I wonder whether self-handicapping is way some people develop to manage this interaction.

Anyway, enough speculation, but I recommend reading the article as it highlights an area that I wasn’t aware of and has many intriguing possibilities.

Link to NYT article on self-handicapping.

View original post here:
Self-destruction lite

The New York Times has a thought-provoking article about self-handicapping - the attempt to actually make yourself worse at something. The idea is that if a bad performance is expected, some people actively try and handicap themselves before hand, for example by not practising or by getting drunk, so they have an excuse already lined up and can preserve their self-esteem when they don’t do very well.

I’m sure we’ve all heard about this sort of behaviour discussed anecdotally, but I didn’t realise it’s actually been quite well researched by psychologists since the late 1970s.

Some snippets from the article:

Psychologists have studied this sort of behavior since at least 1978, when Steven Berglas and Edward E. Jones used the phrase “self-handicapping” to describe students in a study who chose to take a drug that they were told would inhibit their performance on an exam (the drug was actually inert)…

Yet given the opportunity, and a good reason, most people will claim some handicap. In a paper [pdf] published last summer, Sean McCrea, a psychologist at the University of Konstanz in Germany, described experiments in which he manipulated participants’ scores on a variety of intelligence tests. In some, the subjects could choose to prepare before taking the test or could join the “no practice” group.

Sure enough, Dr. McCrea found that those told they got bad scores blamed a lack of practice, if they could, and that citing this handicap cushioned the blow to their self-confidence…

As a short-term strategy, self-handicapping is often no more than an exercise in self-delusion. Studies of college students have found that habitual handicappers — who skip a lot of classes; who miss deadlines; who don’t buy the textbook — tend to rate themselves in the top 10 percent of the class, though their grades slouch between C and D.

I wonder how this interacts with the effects of different types of praise and beliefs about intelligence, studied by psychologist Carol Dweck.

She has found that praising a child’s effort on a task (”you’ve worked really hard!”) has a motivating effect, whereas praising the child by attributing their success to a character trait (”you’re really clever”) caused them to become to be more distressed when they encounter failure and lead them to chose easier tasks afterwards.

Her work suggests this is because a belief that intelligence is flexible and effort-related, rather than a fixed character trait, actually makes us more motivated and helps us perform better as we don’t feel we are less intelligent if we fail.

It reflects a likely interaction between performance and self-esteem, mediated by beliefs about competence and I wonder whether self-handicapping is way some people develop to manage this interaction.

Anyway, enough speculation, but I recommend reading the article as it highlights an area that I wasn’t aware of and has many intriguing possibilities.

Link to NYT article on self-handicapping.

Original post:
Self-destruction lite

The New York Times has a thought-provoking article about self-handicapping - the attempt to actually make yourself worse at something. The idea is that if a bad performance is expected, some people actively try and handicap themselves before hand, for example by not practising or by getting drunk, so they have an excuse already lined up and can preserve their self-esteem when they don’t do very well.

I’m sure we’ve all heard about this sort of behaviour discussed anecdotally, but I didn’t realise it’s actually been quite well researched by psychologists since the late 1970s.

Some snippets from the article:

Psychologists have studied this sort of behavior since at least 1978, when Steven Berglas and Edward E. Jones used the phrase “self-handicapping” to describe students in a study who chose to take a drug that they were told would inhibit their performance on an exam (the drug was actually inert)…

Yet given the opportunity, and a good reason, most people will claim some handicap. In a paper [pdf] published last summer, Sean McCrea, a psychologist at the University of Konstanz in Germany, described experiments in which he manipulated participants’ scores on a variety of intelligence tests. In some, the subjects could choose to prepare before taking the test or could join the “no practice” group.

Sure enough, Dr. McCrea found that those told they got bad scores blamed a lack of practice, if they could, and that citing this handicap cushioned the blow to their self-confidence…

As a short-term strategy, self-handicapping is often no more than an exercise in self-delusion. Studies of college students have found that habitual handicappers — who skip a lot of classes; who miss deadlines; who don’t buy the textbook — tend to rate themselves in the top 10 percent of the class, though their grades slouch between C and D.

I wonder how this interacts with the effects of different types of praise and beliefs about intelligence, studied by psychologist Carol Dweck.

She has found that praising a child’s effort on a task (”you’ve worked really hard!”) has a motivating effect, whereas praising the child by attributing their success to a character trait (”you’re really clever”) caused them to become to be more distressed when they encounter failure and lead them to chose easier tasks afterwards.

Her work suggests this is because a belief that intelligence is flexible and effort-related, rather than a fixed character trait, actually makes us more motivated and helps us perform better as we don’t feel we are less intelligent if we fail.

It reflects a likely interaction between performance and self-esteem, mediated by beliefs about competence and I wonder whether self-handicapping is way some people develop to manage this interaction.

Anyway, enough speculation, but I recommend reading the article as it highlights an area that I wasn’t aware of and has many intriguing possibilities.

Link to NYT article on self-handicapping.

Continued here:
Self-destruction lite

The New York Times has a thought-provoking article about self-handicapping - the attempt to actually make yourself worse at something. The idea is that if a bad performance is expected, some people actively try and handicap themselves before hand, for example by not practising or by getting drunk, so they have an excuse already lined up and can preserve their self-esteem when they don’t do very well.

I’m sure we’ve all heard about this sort of behaviour discussed anecdotally, but I didn’t realise it’s actually been quite well researched by psychologists since the late 1970s.

Some snippets from the article:

Psychologists have studied this sort of behavior since at least 1978, when Steven Berglas and Edward E. Jones used the phrase “self-handicapping” to describe students in a study who chose to take a drug that they were told would inhibit their performance on an exam (the drug was actually inert)…

Yet given the opportunity, and a good reason, most people will claim some handicap. In a paper [pdf] published last summer, Sean McCrea, a psychologist at the University of Konstanz in Germany, described experiments in which he manipulated participants’ scores on a variety of intelligence tests. In some, the subjects could choose to prepare before taking the test or could join the “no practice” group.

Sure enough, Dr. McCrea found that those told they got bad scores blamed a lack of practice, if they could, and that citing this handicap cushioned the blow to their self-confidence…

As a short-term strategy, self-handicapping is often no more than an exercise in self-delusion. Studies of college students have found that habitual handicappers — who skip a lot of classes; who miss deadlines; who don’t buy the textbook — tend to rate themselves in the top 10 percent of the class, though their grades slouch between C and D.

I wonder how this interacts with the effects of different types of praise and beliefs about intelligence, studied by psychologist Carol Dweck.

She has found that praising a child’s effort on a task (”you’ve worked really hard!”) has a motivating effect, whereas praising the child by attributing their success to a character trait (”you’re really clever”) caused them to become to be more distressed when they encounter failure and lead them to chose easier tasks afterwards.

Her work suggests this is because a belief that intelligence is flexible and effort-related, rather than a fixed character trait, actually makes us more motivated and helps us perform better as we don’t feel we are less intelligent if we fail.

It reflects a likely interaction between performance and self-esteem, mediated by beliefs about competence and I wonder whether self-handicapping is way some people develop to manage this interaction.

Anyway, enough speculation, but I recommend reading the article as it highlights an area that I wasn’t aware of and has many intriguing possibilities.

Link to NYT article on self-handicapping.

Source:
Self-destruction lite

The New York Times has a thought-provoking article about self-handicapping - the attempt to actually make yourself worse at something. The idea is that if a bad performance is expected, some people actively try and handicap themselves before hand, for example by not practising or by getting drunk, so they have an excuse already lined up and can preserve their self-esteem when they don’t do very well.

I’m sure we’ve all heard about this sort of behaviour discussed anecdotally, but I didn’t realise it’s actually been quite well researched by psychologists since the late 1970s.

Some snippets from the article:

Psychologists have studied this sort of behavior since at least 1978, when Steven Berglas and Edward E. Jones used the phrase “self-handicapping” to describe students in a study who chose to take a drug that they were told would inhibit their performance on an exam (the drug was actually inert)…

Yet given the opportunity, and a good reason, most people will claim some handicap. In a paper [pdf] published last summer, Sean McCrea, a psychologist at the University of Konstanz in Germany, described experiments in which he manipulated participants’ scores on a variety of intelligence tests. In some, the subjects could choose to prepare before taking the test or could join the “no practice” group.

Sure enough, Dr. McCrea found that those told they got bad scores blamed a lack of practice, if they could, and that citing this handicap cushioned the blow to their self-confidence…

As a short-term strategy, self-handicapping is often no more than an exercise in self-delusion. Studies of college students have found that habitual handicappers — who skip a lot of classes; who miss deadlines; who don’t buy the textbook — tend to rate themselves in the top 10 percent of the class, though their grades slouch between C and D.

I wonder how this interacts with the effects of different types of praise and beliefs about intelligence, studied by psychologist Carol Dweck.

She has found that praising a child’s effort on a task (”you’ve worked really hard!”) has a motivating effect, whereas praising the child by attributing their success to a character trait (”you’re really clever”) caused them to become to be more distressed when they encounter failure and lead them to chose easier tasks afterwards.

Her work suggests this is because a belief that intelligence is flexible and effort-related, rather than a fixed character trait, actually makes us more motivated and helps us perform better as we don’t feel we are less intelligent if we fail.

It reflects a likely interaction between performance and self-esteem, mediated by beliefs about competence and I wonder whether self-handicapping is way some people develop to manage this interaction.

Anyway, enough speculation, but I recommend reading the article as it highlights an area that I wasn’t aware of and has many intriguing possibilities.

Link to NYT article on self-handicapping.

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Self-destruction lite