The use of social comparison information for self-evaluation may be viewed as a major developmental step in children's growing understanding of their competencies and limitations. The two studies presented suggest that children's achievement-related self-evaluations are little affected by relative comparisons until surprisingly late-that is, not earlier than 7-8 years of age. In Study 1, 104 first and second graders performed a task with 3 coacting peers; only the second graders made any use at all of the social comparison information in their evaluative judgments. In Study 2 an attempt was made to maximize the potential for using comparative information by providing a strong incentive to engage in social comparison of abilities in a situation in which objective information about a success/failure outcome was unavailable. The 90 kindergarten, second, and fourth graders played a game with peers and made competence-related self-evaluations and decisions about future performance. Only the judgments of the fourth graders were consistently affected by the social comparison information. The results are discussed in terms of their relation to previous research on the development of social comparison and of possible explanations for the developmental trends observed.Recent theoretical approaches to social development have emphasized a kind of self-socialization process (Maccoby & Jacklin, 1974; Hartup, Note 1) in which children are viewed as active processors of social information, seeking norms or guidelines to define appropriate behavior and to evaluate themselves. One particularly important source of information during this self-socialization process is the peer groupthat is, how one's own behavior compares to relevant others. This social comparison process is thought to be central to selfevaluation in adults (Festinger, 1954;Suls & Miller, 1977), but there has been little
The present study examined the hypothesis that students would show performance impairment when they were exposed to teachers who were pressured to maximize student performance level and who used controlling strategies. For this purpose, 4th-grade teachers and their students participated in a field experiment in which teachers either were pressured to maximize student performance or were told simply to help their students learn. In addition, the teaching sessions were videotaped to assess teachers' use of controlling strategies, as rated by blind coders. Following the teaching sessions, student performance on tasks initially taught by teachers as well as on a generalization task was assessed by blind experimenters. As predicted, the data indicated that students evidenced performance impairment during the subsequent testing session only when they were exposed to pressured teachers using controlling strategies. The results are discussed within the context of self-determination theory.
This study examined the conditions under which information regarding competence would mitigate the negative side effects of rewards on the intrinsic interest of preschool and middle elementary school children. Children engaging in a task of high initial interest anticipated a reward made contingent either upon meeting a standard based on absolute performance level or upon task engagement alone, or they were not rewarded. In addition, they were provided with direct information concerning competence presented in terms of social comparison. The pattern of results indicated that the preschool children were primarily affected by information about meeting the absolute standard but not the social comparison information. That is, the overjuslihcation effect did not occur when attaining a reward was made contingent on meeting an absolute standard of performance. In contrast, social comparison information superseded the effect of the contingency of the reward on subsequent interest in the target task for the older children. These findings suggest the importance of research from a developmental perspective for attempts to delineate the conditions under which rewards may avert the undermining of intrinsic interest.A number of researchers have demonstrated that offering a reward to a person for engaging in an otherwise enjoyable activity will undermine that person's subsequent interest in that activity when the reward is discontinued-a phenomenon typically explained by means of an attributional analysis (Bern, 1972;Nisbett & Valins, 1971) and termed the overjustification effect (Lepper, Greene, & Nisbett, 1973). That is, if the justification for having undertaken an interesting task is perceived to be an overly sufficient reason for task engagement (e.g., an extrinsic incentive), the person would then infer that behavior was motivated by the reward itself rather than by enjoyment, thereby decreasingThe authors are grateful to Mark Lepper, Michael Ross, Thane Pittman, and Nina Fcldman for many helpful suggestions on an earlier draft of this paper, and to Jeanne Courlright, Barbara Hoyler, and Paget Gross for their invaluable assistance in collecting the data.Requests for reprints should be sent to Diane N.
The purpose of this study was to test three models with regard to the linkages among autonomy support, intrinsic motivation, and perceived competence. The first model is based on Cognitive Evaluation Theory and postulates that teachers’ autonomy support influences changes in intrinsic motivation via changes in perceived academic competence. However, the second and the third model are based on the Diathesis Stress Model of Achievement Processes and posit, respectively, that intrinsic motivation could play a mediating and a moderating role in the relation between teachers’ autonomy support and changes in perceived competence. A total of 215 fifth-grade children participated in a longitudinal study over a 1-year period. Results from regression analyses provided some support for the first model but stronger support for the second and third model.
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