After a year of contemplation and millions of urges from my friends and parents, I finally have a blog. But there is a lone person to thank for this, and that is my Social Psychology professor, Dr. Kevin McIntyre. He gave us this term project to open a blog. And today, as I sit in my best friend’s room for the Spring Break trying to come up with a blog, I start thinking, “If creating a blog was so simple, why didn’t I create one long time ago?”
The answer to that question is very simple. My friends would often quote me saying “I was born technologically impaired” if you asked them about my relationship with technology. Since childhood, I always had a fear of technology; a fear so strong that my dad SOLD away my first camera (a good, 10 mega pixel digital camera – it was one of the finest; at least that is what my friends had told me to say back then.. lol) because I wouldn’t use it!! But now as I read through the psychology literature, I came across the literature on the phenomenon of Self-Handicap.
To Self-Handicap is to put obstacles in the way of one’s own performance so that the anticipated pr possible failure can be blamed on the obstacle instead of on the lack of ability. As a child I would never make an effort to learn how to operate technological devices. Therefore, when the time came to operate them, I would conveniently blame it to my genes (and hope against hope that this bluff would work.. lol) or to the incapability of my intelligence to aide me handling technology. I wouldn’t read the beginner’s manual or see the appropriate signs while using equipment and eventually blame it to me not being good with technology. The fact was I always knew the result before even trying to use technology – failure on my part and therefore would try to put obstacles of all kinds to compensate for that result.
In one of the experiments, participants were told that the purpose of the experiment was to investigate the temporary effect of a certain drug on intelligence performance (Berglas & Jones, 1978). Participants were told that one of the drugs would make the participant smarter and the other drug would lower the intelligence performance. Participants were divided into two groups. One group was given a set of unsolvable multiple-choice questions and the experimenter kept on saying that the participants were doing well even though the participants were only guessing the answers and experienced non-contingent success. At some point in time, the participants had to know that they didn’t actually deserve their true ratings. The other group of participants were given an easy set of questions and were accurately told which ones they did correctly and hence experience contingent success. All the participants were told that they had done the best that the experimenters had seen so far.
For the second part of the experiment, participants had to undergo a second IQ test after choosing one of the two drugs: Actavil (which would supposedly increase intellectual performance) or Pandocrin (which would supposedly decrease intellectual performance). Participants who belonged to the non-contingent success group chose to have Pandocrin so that they can blame their weaker performance in the second IQ test on the drug. These participants knew that they weren’t as intelligent as the experimenter thought they were and needed an alibi to blame their performance.
There are numerous studies like this which reflect on ways in which people handicap themselves like the Tice study (1991) or when a European chess champion, Deschappelles, self-handicapped himself as he grew old. Many students do it before an exam night by drinking alcohol and then blame the alcohol for the poor performance.
Hence, please don’t self-handicap yourself and deprive yourself of the wonderful opportunities that await you!
Happy non self-handicap, especially as the end-semester exams approach,
Nupur
P.S. the name for the blog, “Rekindle the Spark” is a tribute to my dad who gifted me a Kindle after I overcame my “technological impairment!” ;)
(So you see there are beneficial outcomes of fighting the thing that you fear and not being handicapped by it!)
No comments:
Post a Comment