Choice of difficult tasks as a strategy of compensating for identity-relevant failure

This study examined the hypothesis that in the realm of self-definitional commitments, individuals try to compensate for failure experiences by increasing their aspirational standards with respect to further self-defining task achievements. Students committed to the self-definition of becoming a physician first received either failure feedback or no feedback on a number-tracking test and were then asked to select from a visual-search test a number of tasks that differed with respect to their difficulty. When the skills involved in these tests were described as relevant to the profession of a physician, students pretreated with failure chose more difficult tasks than their no-feedback counterparts. No such effect emerged when the two tests were described as nonrelevant to students' professional self-definition. Yet, in this nonrelevant condition, task choice was predicted by a measure of self-handicapping. (C) 2000 Academic Press.