PERFORMANCE DEFICITS FOLLOWING FAILURE - LEARNED HELPLESSNESS OR SELF-ESTEEM PROTECTION

We report two laboratory experiments which compare two competing expla nations of performance deficits following failure: one based on Seligm an's learned helplessness theory (LHT), and the other, on self-esteem protection theory (SEPT). In both studies, participants (Study 1: N = 40 pupils from secondary schools in Walbrzych, Poland; Study 2: N = 45 students from the University of Bielefeld, Germany) were confronted w ith either success or failure in a first phase of the experiment. Then , in the second phase of the experiment the participants had to work o n a set of mathematical problems (Study 1) or a set of tasks taken fro m Raven's Progressive Matrices (Study 2) either privately or in public . In both studies failure in the first phase causes performance defici ts in the second phase only if the participants had to solve the test tasks in public. These results were interpreted in line with SEPT and as incompatible with LHT.