How Age,Gender and Self-Perception Affect Self-Handicapping Essay

How Age,Gender and Self-Perception Affect Self-Handicapping - Essay Example The matter has caused so much attention from psychologists because of its perceived importance in helping create better responses from students and employees alike. Therefore, there have been much studies conducted to further understand the implications of self-handicapping in schools. In addition, more studies are being employed to consider more variables such as culture, setting and other factors. As more researches have been conducted, proven and accepted regarding the matter on the factors such as age, gender and self-perception, this paper will deal particularly on the aforementioned three components affecting self-handicaps in addition to the definition of the term. This paper will show how age affects self-handicapping. In addition, it will also show that women have been found to be more resilient and therefore able to escape self-handicapping more than men. Lastly, the paper will also look deeper into how self-perception affects the tendency of self-handicapping. First and fo remost, it is the aim of this paper to expound on what self-handicap is all about. According to McCrea and Flamm (2011), self-handicapping is â€Å"an anticipatory self-protective strategy in which individuals create or claim obstacles to success prior to an important performance to excuse potential failure†. ... Understandably, individuals tend to take pride in themselves regardless of their abilities and capabilities so that they would want to be appreciated most of the time especially when they perform well. Nevertheless, failure is inevitable even to the best of the best. However, there is such a circumstance that most people resort to in order to escape the embarrassment of failure and it is called self-handicapping. Leondari and Gonida (2007) summarize the definition of term saying, â€Å"it involves creating obstacles to successful performance on tasks that the individual considers important†. Such obstacles are influenced by factors such as age, gender and self-perception. Just like in many circumstances, age makes a difference in how people react. In the case of self-handicapping, it has been found out that younger children are less inclined to self-handicap compared to older children. According to a study performed on a population of 702 students in Greece, there is no signif icant difference in self-handicapping among the elementary and high school students involved in the experiment. Initially, the researchers assumed that high school students will use self-handicapping strategies more than elementary students because the â€Å"high school environment is more competitive and places more emphasis on performance demands† (Leondari & Gonida, 2007). Nevertheless, their study proved the supposition wrong. What the researchers have found though was that, task goals significantly affected the result of self-handicapping strategies. This means that task goals are more of a motivation to one’s accomplishment in relation to age rather than age alone as a factor influencing self-handicapping. From the