The Effects Of Achievement Goal-Orientation And Self-esteem Of Undergraduates On Self-handicapping In Different Situations

Self-handicapping is a strategy which is used to protect or promote individuals' self-esteem in the case of their self-esteem is threatened, so self-esteem and self-handicapping has an indiscerptible relation. With the application of indirect measurement techniques, the understanding and research on self-esteem has been ascended to a new higher degree, namely, understanding and reviewing self-esteem from two aspects explicit self-esteem and implicit self-esteem.Achievement goal is a perception of individual's aims or causes on achievement assignment and an estimate of individual's goal fulfillment. Achievement goal has four dimensionalities: mastery-approach, mastery-avoidance, performance-approach and performance-avoidance.In fact,Self-handicapping is an important and complicated problem.What has been inquired into in this study are the effects of achievement goal-orientation and self-esteem of undergraduates on self-handicapping in different situations. The study involves five kinds of situations,namely,succeed situation, neutral situation, failure situation, social estimate situation and self-estimate situation.The method which was used to manipulate achievment goal is the latest quartation ,namely, mastery-approach goal, mastery-avoidance goal, performance-approach goal, performance-avoidance goal. Self-esteem is investigated from the explicit self-esteem and the implicit self-esteem. Subjects are undergraduates. Various methods, such as self-report scale, Implicit Association Test (IAT) and situational test, are employed in the experiments. The findings of the study are showed as follows:a) The level of explicit self-esteem and implicit self-esteem of different students with different goals-orientation should be decided according to the situations. However, in the situations of success and self- estimate, the explicit self-esteem of mastery-goal orientation is much higher than that of performance- goal orientation.b)The individuals both with high and with low explicit self-esteem, they will use self-handicapping. However, the low explicit self-esteem and low implicit self-esteem are more tendentious to make self-handicapping than the high explicit self-esteem andhigh implicit self-esteem.c) In different situations, the role of achievement goal and self-esteem in predicating self-handicapping not only has its universality but also has its situation. Universality means performance-avoidance goal not only has a significant positive predicator of self-handicapping in different situations but also has much more predictable power to self-handicapping than any other predicator variables, compared with other predicator variables studied in this paper .Situation means the combination of performance-avoidance goal and other predicator variables (e.g. mastery-approach goal, mastery-avoidance goal, performance-approach goal, explicit self-esteem and implicit self-esteem) has different predictable roles in predicting self-handicapping in different situations.