The Potency of the Potential for Experimenter and Self-Evaluation in Motivating Vigilance Performance
Title:
The Potency of the Potential for Experimenter and Self-Evaluation in Motivating Vigilance Performance
Author:
Harkins, Stephen G.
Appeared in:
Basic and applied social psychology
Paging:
Volume 22 (2000) nr. 4 pages 277-289
Year:
2000-12-01
Contents:
Harkins and Szymanski (1988) showed that participants were motivated enough by the potential for self-evaluation to keep track of the number of signals presented during a vigilance task to do so. In fact, these participants performed as well as participants subject to experimenter evaluation. However, recent research on goal setting (Harkins, White, & Utman, 2000) has shown that when the experimenter set a more stringent performance criterion, the potential for self-evaluation led to poorer performance than experimenter evaluation. In this article, we show that increasing the effort required for self-evaluation by doubling the number of signals in the vigilance task also led these participants to perform more poorly than participants subject to experimenter evaluation. These findings suggest that participants are less willing to exert effort in service of self-evaluation than in response to the potential for experimenter evaluation, at least on the simple tasks used in this research (e.g., vigilance and use-generation).
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