Cognitive and affective reactions to success and failure – the quality of feedback as the determinant of self-verifying and self-enhancing motivation1

A study was conducted to ascertain what the dominant self motivation is like – selfverifying or self-enhancing? – in a situation when a person is faced with a negative evaluation of a central personality characteristic. Previous research suggested that affective reactions should follow the pattern predicted by self-enhancement theory by which all individuals would react with positive affect to positive evaluation and with negative affect to negative evaluation. On the other side, cognitive reactions are expected to follow the pattern predicted by self-verification theory which suggests that information consistent with the self-concept should be the most convincing (i.e. cognitive reactions should be influenced by interaction of feedback and self-esteem). Ninety female respondents were given a false favorable or extremely unfavorable feedback about their achievement on an intelligence test, after which their cognitive and affective reactions were measured. The results revealed that the respondents demonstrated a self-enhancing motivation both in the affective and the cognitive domain, i.e., regardless of their level of self-esteem, those who had failed experienced more negative affect, rated test more unfavorably, assessed it as less accurate, and claimed they had invested less effort to solve the test, than those who were successful. The research imposes conclusion that cognitive reactions to failure are not conditioned only by the degree of negativity or positivity of global self-views, but also by the quality/intensity of unfavorable feedback. This conclusion provides important methodological implications for future research in this area.