People rarely have only a single opportunity to perform, but instead repeat tasks and develop a history of performance across time - and this trajectory likely contains both cumulative patterns and unique fluctuations at each instance. How, then, do people respond when they consider these different aspects of their past performance that may tell different stories? In this study, I consider how performance perceptions influence subsequent effort and performance. Three-hundred and ninety-five undergraduates participated in a lab study where they completed several trials on a task and then received bogus feedback regarding their performance; and they subsequently responded to self-reports of self-efficacy and discrepancy and then completed another performance trial. I hypothesized that task construal would influence how participants viewed their performance feedback and thus change the aforementioned outcomes. Other hypotheses concerned relationships between self-efficacy, discrepancy, effort, and performance. Results do not support my predictions and are discussed with respect to possible conclusions.
Read
