Sg. Harkins, The potency of the potential for experimenter and self-evaluation in motivating vigilance performance, BAS APPL PS, 22(4), 2000, pp. 277-289
Harkins and Szymanski (1988) showed that participants were motivated enough
by the potential for self-evaluation to keep track of the number of signal
s presented during a vigilance task to do so. In fact, these participants p
erformed as well as participants subject to experimenter evaluation. Howeve
r, recent research on goal setting (Harkins, White, & Utman, 2000) has show
n that when the experimenter set a more stringent performance criterion, th
e potential for self-evaluation led to poorer performance than experimenter
evaluation. In this article, we show that increasing the effort required f
or self-evaluation by doubling the number of signals in the vigilance task
also led these participants to perform more poorly than participants subjec
t to experimenter evaluation. These findings suggest that participants are
less willing to exert effort in service of self-evaluation than in response
to the potential for experimenter evaluation, at least on the simple tasks
used in this research (e.g., vigilance and use-generation).