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Today I should work on my 2nd week statistics assignment. But I'm way behind on my schedule. I've got two exams due at June 7 and another on June 15. I really really want to pass and possibly with good grades. But I've done very little to achieve this since last Friday. Why am I doing this? Why am I not working?
Applied social psychologists call this phenomenon 'self-handicapping'. Apparently I'm not working because I try to "enhance the opportunities to externalize failure and to internalize success". In other words: I'm searching for excuses to blame a possible failure on. When I don't pass the exams I can say: "I just studied not hard enough, it's not that I'm a bad student, it's due to circumstances I failed the exam." When I pass the exam, I can say: "Even though I did not prepare as well as I could I passed, I must be a real genius". This makes self-handicapping a very attractive way to face my educational activities. I've got an excuse, no matter what. It's not very smart though.
How come I got into this attitude? Well, according to those applied social psychologists, certain personality traits and attitudes enhance self-handicapping. When you are a very goal-oriented person, and when you tend to associate getting good grades with status and winning, you are more vulnerable to self-handicapping. I can see for myself how this works: I think getting my bachelor's degree is very important. I feel like my future depends on it. I cannot fail, if I do I ruin my future. I'm also the only person in my family who was able to go to university. Most of my relatives dropped out of High School and my father never made it into High School, he finished secondary school and had to go out working at age 15 as a worker on a farm. So he thinks it's very important for me to finish my education. It's not hard to see that there's a lot of pressure. So therefore there's also a tendency to find excuses to deal with the pressure.
I am not the only one who feels the pressure to achieve. A lot of students do, therefore a lot of them self-handicap. Everyone who attended college recognizes it: instead of studying people start cleaning their room, after that's finished, they do the dishes, they find all kinds of chores that "have to be done" in order to avoid studying. My colleague applied psychologists have also a solution to avoid self-handicapping: they advise to focus on your progress. So in my case I mustn't focus on my status or on getting my bachelor's degree, I have to focus on the process instead. So I study because it is interesting, because I can develop my knowledge etc. I read this book because I want to know more about Gerontology, because I think applied psychology is interesting and I do my assigments because I want to know how statistics work. I want to understand. When I study with this attitude, I enjoy it, I feel less pressure and I'm less likely to procrastinate.
So I'm going to do that right now. Of course, typing this blog was just an act of procrastination. 
Want to know more about self-handicapping in academics or sports? Go over to these links:
- Academic article by Charles E Kimble and Edward R Hirt
- The self-handicapping phenomenon by Janet M. Ferguson and Jeffrey Dorman
- Procrastination: Habit or Disorder? by Jenny Maryasis
- Column by Paul C. Bernhardt, M.S
Posted under Psychology
This post was written by Inge on May 31, 2007
Uitstelgedrag is inderdaad een bekend onderwerp op studentenweblogs.
I prefer English responses on my English blog.
But indeed, procrastination is a returning theme on students’ weblogs.