Dealing With Threats to The Self: Part One

1. Dealing With Threats to The Self: Part One

2. What is a Self-Threat? • “when favorable views about oneself are questioned, contradicted, impugned, mocked, challenged, or otherwise put in jeopardy” (Baumeister et al., 1996).

3. How do people maintain favorable self-views? 1. Self-Serving Bias- tendency to take credit for success (self-enhancement) and deny responsibility for failure (self-protection).

4. Self-Serving Bias Miller & Ross (1975) review article: • Teacher-Student Paradigm

5. Self-Serving Bias Miller & Ross review article: • Achievement Tasks • Effect of success vs. failure on attributions.

6. Self-Serving Bias Miller & Ross review article: • Conclusions • Research supports self-enhancement, but not self-protection. • Self-enhancement can be explained in non-motivational terms: • Covariation b/w effort and success • Success is the expected outcome

7. Self-Serving Bias Evidence for a motivational explanation: • Miller (1976)—ego involvement • Campbell & Sedikides (1999)– Meta-analysis of moderators of SSB. • High SE • High achievement motivation • High expectations • Moderately challenging tasks vs. unchallenging • Competitive settings • Positive mood …all lead to greater SSB!

8. 2. Self-Handicapping • Undermining performance so that one has a handy excuse for failure (self-protection) or a boost to self-esteem (self-enhancement) in the event of success.

9. Types of Self-Handicapping • Behavioral- person actually creates impediments to performance. • Claimed- person claims impediments to performance.

10. Berglas & Jones’ Study • Cover story: study of drugs and intellectual performance. • Contingent Success Condition: intellectual test was tailored so that all p’s performed well. • Non-contingent Success Condition: intellectual test contained mostly unsolvable items, but p’s were told they did well.

11. Choice of Drug Actavil facilitates intellectual performance. Pandocrin inhibits intellectual performance. 10mg 7.5mg 5mg 2.5mg 0 2.5mg 5mg 7.5mg 10mg Actavil Actavil Pandocrin Pandocrin

12. Results

13. Gender Differences in Self-Handicapping • Males are more likely to self-handicap, but only on measures of behavioral self-handicapping. • Why? Women may be less threatened by failure or they may experience the same amount of threat, but choose to deal with it differently (Hirt et al., 2000).

14. Self-Esteem Differences in S-H Tice (1991) • Self-enhancement condition: test can clearly identify high ability, but not low ability. • Self-protection condition: test can clearly identify low ability, but not high ability. • Also, test framed as important or unimportant. • DV: amount of time practicing before test.

15. Self-Esteem Differences in S-H

16. Consequences of Self-Handicapping • Rhodewalt et al. (1991) found that self-handicapping leads to better mood and self-esteem following failure. • Zuckerman et al. (1998) show that there are costs in the long run.

17. Zuckerman et al. (1998) Study 1: • Students completed questionnaires at beginning and end of semester. • Higher SH predicts lower GPA.

18. Zuckerman et al. (1998) Study 2: • Replicated Study 1 • Found cyclical relationship between SE and SH. • Also cyclical relationship between negative affect and SH.