Confidence Maintenance and Performance as a Function of Chronic Self-Esteem and Initial Task Experience

Abstract

An investigation of the effects of differences in chronic self-esteem and initial success or failure experiences on confidence rating changes and performance was conducted. High and low self-esteem Ss were required to solve 5 easy anagrams (success condition) or 5 very difficult anagrams (failure condition) before attempting to solve 15 common anagrams of moderate difficulty. The major results indicated that high self-esteem Ss had a higher number of trials with no expectancy change than low self-esteem Ss following initial failure, while low self-esteem Ss had had more of these nonreaction cases than Ss with high self-esteem following initial success.