Hypercompetitiveness in academia: Achieving criterion-related validity from item context specificity

A measurement of a conditional disposition, academic hypercompetitiveness, was created via the contextualization of hypercompetitiveness scale items i nto situations and circumstances relevant to academic life. An investigatio n of the construct and criterion-related validity of this new instrument, t he Hypercompetitiveness in Academia (HIA) scale, was conducted. The HIA sca le was found to be more strongly associated with academic outcomes and achi evements than a scale measuring individual differences in a generalized, co ntext-independent, hypercompetitive disposition. Conversely, the,generalize d hypercompetitiveness scale was found to be more strongly associated with measures of antisocial dispositions. The implications of this research on H omey's (1937) theory of neurosis, the possible negative repercussions of ac ademic hypercompetitiveness, and the study of individual differences throug h investigations of conditional dispositions were discussed.