The potency of the potential for experimenter and self-evaluation in motivating vigilance performance

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).