PSY 3109 Chapter Notes - Chapter 9: Presupposition, Motivation, Longitudinal Study
15 May 2018
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Unit 4: Success and Failure (Chapter 8)
Are success and failure the same for everyone? No
Is there such a thing as objective success and failure? What someone sees as a success
could be a failure for someone else, if you dont meet expectations or you do, this can mean
either success or failure, friends and families opinions
Does everyone respond the same to success and failure? No, your goals always change
depending on how you did on any previous attempts
How do successes and failures change our goals?
Level of Aspiration: the level of future performance in a familiar task which an individual,
knowing his level of past performance in that task, explicitly undertakes to reach
• How well I expect to do I continent in how well I have done before, setting
realistic goals
• Involves choice— about how much difficulty to take on and how high to set ones
sights
• We make these types of decisions about minor and major matters
• level of aspiration is determined primarily by the achievement or failure of the
previous level of aspiration, regardless of the overall, absolute level of
achievement when youre thinking about goal setting everything is objective
• Thus, a student striving for an A who receives a B will be disappointed, but a
student striving for a C who gets a B will be satisfied.
• Following perceived success aspiration level typically increases, and following
perceived failure aspiration level typically goes down. But not always!
Resultant Valence Theory. anticipated success has a positive valence and anticipated
failure a negative valence. The valences of success and failure depend, at least in part, on
the difficulty of the task.
• In other words, success is more impressive when the task is difficult, and failure
is more painful when the task is easy.
For each level of difficulty there are corresponding subjective likelihoods of success or
failure - The goal: Dont eat it.
The experience of success and failure does not depend upon the achievement as such,
but rather upon the relation between the achievement and the persons expectation.
• For example, a person may throw a discus 40 yards the first time. The second
time they may reach 50, and feel successful. After short practice, they may reach
65. If they then throw 50 yards again, they will experience a definite failure in
spite of the fact that they got a thrill out of the same achievement a short time
before.
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Document Summary
What someone sees as a success could be a failure for someone else, if you don(cid:495)t meet expectations or you do, this can mean either success or failure, friends and families opinions. No, your goals always change depending on how you did on any previous attempts. Resultant valence theory. anticipated success has a positive valence and anticipated failure a negative valence. The valences of success and failure depend, at least in part, on the difficulty of the task. In other words, success is more impressive when the task is difficult, and failure is more painful when the task is easy. For each level of difficulty there are corresponding subjective likelihoods of success or failure - the goal: don(cid:495)t eat it. but rather upon the relation between the achievement and the person(cid:495)s expectation. The experience of success and failure does not depend upon the achievement as such: for example, a person may throw a discus 40 yards the first time.
