People create obstacles to their own performance in advance, so that failure can be attributed to the obstacle and success counted as all the more impressive.
Berglas and Jones found in 1978 that subjects who had succeeded on an unsolvable task, and therefore could not know whether they would succeed again, preferentially chose a performance-inhibiting drug before the next attempt. The strategy protects the self-attribution either way, and it costs real performance to do so.
In practice
- A candidate who tells everyone he barely prepared has bought an explanation and lowered his chances.
- A team that raises its own obstacles before a launch has arranged in advance what the post-mortem will say.
- Further reading
- Wikipedia
- Subject
- Psychology & Behavior
- Essay
- A century and a half of measuring the mind