The tendency to sabotage ones performance to provide an excuse for possible failure

When I was eighteen, I was going to college full-time, waiting tables at Don Pablo’s, and using my tips to see a psychotherapist. Some wise part of me recognized that my habit of procrastinating made college even harder than high school, and apparently I was concerned enough to seek help. I remember feeling afraid that procrastination was going to ruin my life. I didn’t understand why I entered into a tortuous cycle of procrastination, anxiety, the inevitable crying fit where I wanted to give up, and then staying up all night every time I had to write a paper or study for a test. I think that when I was younger I could get by and even do well with minimal effort. But then when the difficulty of classes and increase of workload inevitably ensued, I had never developed the proper study skills or the discipline to use them. School had been easy and I grew lazy. Part of problem was that my emotional late-night marathons tended to yield positive results and I think I became dependent on the adrenaline rush to get things done. I romanticized my eccentric creative process as necessary to produce a successful outcome, when really I just hurt myself and the rest of my college career in many ways.

Procrastination is associated with self-handicapping, which is where people do something that may sabotage their performance in order to provide an excuse to explain any subsequent failure. This subconscious strategy stems from a lack of self-efficacy and fear of failure, so that a person’s self-worth remains unaffected in the case of a negative outcome. People who self-handicap are afraid that trying hard and failing at a task translates into their inherent stupidity and worthlessness. Without making the separation between personal character and results, it feel too vulnerable to risk the exposure of unadulterated effort (Schneider, Gruman, & Coutts, 2012).

According to Snyder, Malin, Dent, and Linnenbrink-Garcia (2014), self-handicapping is rooted in attribution theory and gifted students tend to have internal attributions for high achievement, associating ability with outcome. However, gifted students also tend to be insufficiently challenged academically so when they eventually experience failure, their resilience skills can be underdeveloped, leaving them fearful as to whether it’s possible to return to being a successful student. When people feel overwhelmed by performance expectations they often develop self-handicaps, and this is frequently the time when gifted students manifest them as maladaptive coping mechanisms. Because they internally attribute their circumstances, the academic failure (which may actually be minute in reality) is interpreted as the loss of intellectual giftedness instead of poor transient decision-making that can be improved upon in the future. This can lead to what researchers call gifted underachievement where ability is high and achievement is low. The self-worth theory of achievement motivation explains this phenomenon by focusing on the compelling motivation people feel to protect their sense of self-worth. In the case of gifted underachievement, students fear failure and accordingly avoid challenging situations, all in an effort to not threaten their perception of self-worth. This is often achieved through self-handicapping (Snyder et al., 2014).

I think this may have been what happened to me. At the end of elementary school, I was on the gifted program’s honor role, became class president, and had won the award for most physically fit girl in my grade. Fast forward a couple years to junior high and I began experimenting with drugs and alcohol, my grades plummeted, and I started wearing that academic failure as a badge of honor. I actually thought it was cool to flunk a test or even a course. What the heck happened? The Snyder et al. (2014) paper helps elucidate my dramatic shift in behavior. I don’t even remember what occurred, but my parents told me that in seventh grade I had a nasty biology teacher who seemed to have it out for me and I started having trouble in his class, earning C’s and D’s on tests. I had been a perfect student up until that point so my parents were concerned, got involved, met with the teacher, guidance counselor, and principal to understand the issue and seek justice. In my mind, there’s little recollection of that class and no memory of having a traumatizing experience. But something happened, and between that event and being less popular in junior high than elementary school, I bet it was just enough to feel like failure. If I internally attributed that failure as reflections of my ability and self-worth, then it makes sense that my subsequent underachievement was facilitated by the self-handicapping behaviors of procrastination, drugs, and alcohol. It’s amazing to think that I was so fragile as to not feel able to rebound, but it’s also comforting to find in the literature that this can be a common behavioral pattern.

As opposed to the entity theory which views intelligence as fixed in nature, the incremental theory recognizes that ability is mutable and success/failure outcomes are more related to effort. This means that poor performance can be improved with increased work, and the promoting of these incremental messages to gifted students is associated with lower behavioral self-handicapping (Snyder et al., 2014). Another set of interventions to help thwart these self-sabotaging tendencies is to associate with peers that value academic achievement and consciously think about the importance of education in relation to one’s career goals. These efforts are particularly effective towards establishing better priorities and decision making right before a project or exam (Schneider et al., 2012). I wish I had been aware of these obvious yet important practices twenty years ago, but then my life may have traveled a very different course. It’s been more difficult to kick and fight to find independent strategies to avoid self-handicapping but my sense of responsibility, accountability, and self-disciple while not nearly perfect are light-years ahead of where I began. And that feels good to say!

References

Schneider, F. W., Gruman, J. A., & Coutts, L. M. (2012). Applied social psychology: Understanding and addressing social and practical problems. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, Inc.

Snyder, K. E., Malin, J. L., Dent, A. L., & Linnenbrink-Garcia, L. (2014). The message matters: The role of implicit beliefs about giftedness and failure experiences in academic self-handicapping. Journal of Educational Psychology, 106(1), 230-241. doi:http://dx.doi.org.ezaccess.libraries.psu.edu/10.1037/a0034553

Why do people self handicap?

What you believe to be true about yourself is called?

Which of the following is best define as to one's overall assessment of one's worth as a person?

Which of the following is the most effective information cue contributing to the development of self efficacy?