Every ugly exam score, blown deadline and failed project provides the opportunity to try out new excuses. It was a blow-up at home. A sick cat. An emergency at work. Not to mention the roadways: if only they hadn't been so icy. This kind of talk is so familiar that most people quickly dismiss it, even when it comes out of their own mouth.
Genuine excuse artisans hobble themselves, in earnest, before pursuing a goal or delivering a performance. Their excuses come pre-attached: "I never went to class." "I was hung over at the interview." "I had no idea what the college application required."...
Psychologists 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.
The urge goes well beyond a mere lowering of expectations, and it has more to do with protecting self-image than with psychological conflicts rooted in early development, in the Freudian sense. Recent research has helped clarify not just who is prone to self-handicapping but also its consequences and its possible benefits.
In the original conception, Berglas and Jones identified self-handicapping in students who were told they had aced a test made up of impossible-to-answer questions. They had "succeeded" without knowing how or why. "These are the people who are told they are brilliant, without knowing how that inference is derived," said Berglas. The urge to shoot one's own foot seems to be stronger in men than in women. In surveys, Hirt and others have measured the tendency by asking people to rate how well a series of 25 statements describes their own behaviour for example, "I try not to get too intensely involved in competitive activities so it won't hurt too much if i lose or do poorly."
Yet given the opportunity, and a good reason, most people will claim some handicap. Sean McCrea, a psychologist 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. He 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.
But the handicap also had another effect. In another experiment, participants who had a good excuse for their poor scores distracting noises, pumped through headphones they wore during the test ^ were less motivated to prepare for a subsequent test than those who had no excuse. "The handicap allowed them to say, `All things considered, i actually did pretty well'," McCrea said. "And there's no drive to get better."
The burn of embarrassment is, in some sense, the pilot light of motivation. As a short-term strategy, self-handicapping is often no more than an exercise in self-delusion. Those who succeed despite their flirtations with disorder typically grow increasingly fond of the handicap itself, whether drink or drugs or defying rules. "With success, expectations go up, and the behaviour gets more extreme," said Berglas. But the tactic doesn't fool many people. Said one researcher: "It's like the line from the old Brando movie `On the Waterfront': `I coulda been a contender'... In the long term, that may be easier to live with for some people than to know that they did their very best and failed." - The New York Times