Self-handicapping and Rewards in Education

Self-handicapping refers to a cognitive strategy in which people avoid effort in the hopes of keeping potential failure from hurting their self-esteem. In other words, people who self-handicap, typically will shift the blame of their failure on to some other variable other than themselves. An example our text book gives us is of a student named Susan who has a statistics test coming up, she feels that even if she studies she’s going to fail anyway so why bother. The night before the exam Susan chooses to go out with her friends and she studies the next morning only a few hours before the exam. Susan  handicapped her own ability to pass by choosing to go out instead of studying. If Susan fails she’ll blame it on choosing to go out with her friends and if by some miracle she actually does well she will begin to think it is always possible to do well even if handicapped. (Schneider, Gruman, Coutts, 2012)

In order to improve student performance, many times it has been suggested that students should be rewarded for their efforts. This is not a good argument as revealed by a study that was done in 1973. Their proposed research question set out to find if a reward would increase student’s academic efforts. They had two separate groups. Group 1 was told that there was a reward up for whoever could produce the best artwork using magic markers, Group 2 was only given the opportunity to enter their artwork (no prize was mentioned). The researchers found that the group that wasn’t verbally offered a reward for their work, group 2, actually produced better work than the winner of the group who was offered a reward for their entry, group 1. I found this to be a very interesting conclusion to their study and completely unexpected. I guess that only further proves why “students should be paid to do their homework” could never actually work out. (Schneider, Gruman, Coutts, 2012)

After reading about self-handicapping, it has very aggressively shined a light upon my own habits. I, if I’m being honest, often find myself looking for just about anything else I could do before I do my homework. The procrastination is unreal. According to our chapter, I am defined as a ‘self-handicapper’. Now that this issue has really resonated with me after reading I have set a personal mission for myself to try and end these damaging habits. I have the potential to do awesome on an exam and then I go out and put off studying until last minute and do poorly. A real eye opener this chapter has been for me. As for rewards I personally don’t think it would work out for me. Even if I was being offered cash to complete my assignments, I still find them to be very overwhelming and difficult. I would probably be more upset with myself when I procrastinated because I would know I’d be losing out on a reward by not studying. As well, I am upset in the current and real situation where I am actually the one paying just to procrastinate daily and end up stressing out last minute. Being paid to do school work is a weird idea and probably wouldn’t produce any effect. Self-handicapping is a very serious issue that has peaked my interest as to why students would choose to deliberately put their educational goals at risk.

References

Schneider, F. W., Gruman, J. A., and Coutts, L. M. (Eds.) (2012). Applied Social Psychology: Understanding and Addressing Social and Practical Problems (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. ISBN 978-1412976381

1 comment

  1. Your post on self-handicapping was an intriguing read, driven by a few different things that you had mentioned. The first is with respect to the 1973 study that you had highlighted regarding rewards for academic performance. It is certainly surprising to see the results of this study, because I feel that many people would assume that the first group would have yielded better results. While this was explained by utilizing the overjustification effect – the idea that a loss of motivation or interest will occur in conjunction with an excessive external award (Schneider, Gruman, & Coutts, 2013) – the question is how does this vary between each individual?

    The reason that I find this intriguing is because I think each individual varies with respect to what he or she finds motivating. For example, I am actually not very motivated by external rewards, whether those are certificates, monetary incentives, prizes or anything similar to those. Instead, I am motivated simply because I want to learn and make the most of what I do. Plus, if I have an interest in something, I am more likely to want to do it. If though, I am not extremely interested in something, then no matter what prize or reward is offered, it will not change the way I feel about it.

    Beyond the reward realm, I will say that goal setting seems to play a role in my academic performance. Goal setting has been hypothesized to affect overall motivation of students because by setting a goal, a student experiences self-efficacy for attaining it; further, heightened self-efficacy has been shown to sustain overall motivation and even improve skill development (Schunk, 1991). The reason I mention this is because it could be one way to help curb self-handicapping behavior. I know that you had mentioned that you fit the definition of a self-handicapper. I would say that I used to fit this definition, but I have since been able to overcome it by implementing goals into my educational endeavors.

    For example, I have goals for each of my assignments (i.e. assignment A needs to be done by Tuesday, and assignment B by Wednesday), for each of my courses (i.e. I never attained an “A” in any math course until last summer when I made it a goal to finally get myself one) and for each semester (i.e. I will obtain an “A” in every course this semester). I even have goals that I set for a yearly basis (i.e. complete x, y, z courses by this date). For me, setting goals is a way of keeping myself on track and the best part, I control the goals that are set. It provides a sense of personal satisfaction that I attained something that I wanted to attain. Nobody forced me to do it, I did it simply because I wanted to.

    References

    Schneider, F. W., Gruman, J. A., & Coutts, L. M. (2012). Applied Social Psychology: Understanding and Addressing Social and Practical Problems (2nd ed.) Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, Inc.

    Schunk, D. H. (1991). Self-efficacy and academic motivation. Educational Psychologist, 26(3-4), 207-231. doi: 10.1080/00461520.1991.9653133

Leave a Reply


Skip to toolbar