A Fake Personality Report Cancelled the Effect of Failure on 90 Computer Science Students
A 1996 study failed students on a career test, then praised their personalities. The praise erased the failure effect. What that means for stalled goals.
In this article9 sections
Ninety students at the University of Erlangen in Germany, all studying computer science and all asked beforehand whether they had thought about quitting (the two who had were excluded), sat down at a concept-formation test. They were told it measured skills typical of highly qualified computer scientists. Two-thirds were then told they had done poorly. Half of those failed students then filled in a personality questionnaire and were told their answers looked a lot like those of top computer scientists. That feedback was bogus, and it turned out to matter for what they did on the next task.
That is the core of a 1996 paper by Joachim Brunstein and Peter Gollwitzer in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (volume 70, pages 395 to 407). The short answer it gives to “why do I keep not getting anywhere”: failing at something tied to who you want to be creates a pull to restore a sense of being that person, and a cheap signal of it, such as praise for your self-description, switched that pull off in a lab session before any further work had been done.
The theory under the experiment
Wicklund and Gollwitzer’s symbolic self-completion theory, as Brunstein and Gollwitzer summarize it, says that once you commit to an identity such as physician, musician or parent, you go looking for evidence that you have it. They call the evidence “symbols of completeness.” A symbol can be an object, a positive self-description (“I am an award-winning musician”), influencing others in your field, or a successful performance. When one kind of symbol is missing you feel incomplete, and the theory predicts you will go after any other kind. The symbols are treated as substitutes for each other.
Read that twice and the uncomfortable part shows. A recital and a business card with your title on it can, to some extent, soothe the same itch.
What the 90 students did
The experiment had a second stage. Everyone took the d2 Mental Concentration Test, counting correctly identified symbols. Half were told that concentration is characteristic of good computer scientists (the relevant condition). The others got the same test with no mention of the profession. With 15 students per group, the mean d2 scores in Table 3 were:
| No feedback | Failure only | Failure, then flattering personality feedback | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Test framed as relevant to the career | 426.5 | 506.6 | 439.1 |
| Test not framed as relevant | 454.7 | 393.8 | 448.1 |
Failure alone pushed students up by about 80 points when the next task was another chance to prove themselves, and down by about 60 when the next task had nothing to do with the profession. The authors read the first as compensation and the second as preoccupation: a student still stinging from the failed test had less attention left for an unrelated one. Students who got the flattering report landed close to the no-feedback group in both framings (the paper reports no significant differences between them). Self-reported “activity incitement,” a measure of feeling energized versus blocked, told the same story.
Experiment 1, with 96 medical students and a social-competence test, found the same split. Failure on a task framed as a physician’s skill raised later scores on a physician-relevant test and lowered them on an unrelated one. Failure on a task unrelated to the profession did not differ from no feedback, which the authors take to mean that the failure itself was not the cause; the threat to the professional self-definition was.
Where this touches stalled goals
The study does not measure stalled goals. It measures one concentration test in one session. What it adds to the picture is a mechanism that makes inaction look reasonable from the inside: the drive that failure creates is aimed at repairing identity, not at the task, and identity can be patched with something that is not the task. The authors write that social recognition for a self-definition “can also substitute for self-defining task achievements.”
Two neighboring findings sit near this idea, though Brunstein and Gollwitzer tested neither. One is Oettingen’s work on vivid positive fantasies, which the account of what picturing a perfect morning does goes through; it has its own explanation and I would not fold it into self-completion. The other is Gollwitzer’s 2009 paper with Sheeran, Michalski and Seifert in Psychological Science, where other people noticing is the patch: identity-related intentions that others had taken notice of were acted on less intensively in Studies 1 to 3, and Study 4 found that the noticing gave people a “premature sense of possessing the aspired-to identity” (abstract, via Europe PMC). The four experiments are laid out in a separate post on that paper.
The 2009 result is the one that looks hardest on a product like DontSnooze, where friends watch. The distinction I can defend is narrow. In the 2009 studies the audience noticed an intention, which is a statement about the future. A friend who receives a video of you out of bed at 6:40 is shown an event that has happened. Under the 1996 framing that is closer to a successful performance than to a self-description. Whether it therefore resists substitution is my inference, and I have not found a study that tests it. A friend replying “proud of you!” could be a symbol of completeness too, and a person who starts living for the replies has swapped one cheap symbol for another.
What the study cannot tell you
- Both samples were small: 12 per cell in Experiment 1, 15 in Experiment 2. Experiment 2 had 76 men and 14 women.
- The participants were students in one German university’s introductory courses, screened for strong commitment. The authors say they did not test commitment strength, and cite earlier work reporting that weakly committed people tend to withdraw after an identity-relevant failure instead.
- The “failure” was a bogus score on a test in a lab. Years of stalled ambition are not that.
- Each experiment was a single session. The authors write that extensive self-symbolizing might become destructive if it undermined real skill-building, and they flag this as speculation.
- I read the full text of the 1996 paper and the 2009 abstract. I did not read the original 1982 papers (scanned copies that would not extract), so what I say about Wicklund and Gollwitzer’s theory comes from Brunstein and Gollwitzer’s summary of it.
One question to ask your own list
If a goal has gone quiet, check what you have been collecting in its place. The 1996 list of symbols gives you a quick audit: objects bought, descriptions of yourself posted or told, people you have advised, performances actually completed. The first three are cheap. If only the fourth counts, the date of the last one is the number to look at. If the audit shows nothing, the goal may belong on the list of things to drop, a case the Wrosch research on disengagement makes better than I can here.
The wake-up version is easy to apply. A proof-of-waking video in DontSnooze is a record of a performance, sent to the friends you chose, and its absence is visible to them, which makes it harder to replace with a description of how early you intend to rise. The 1996 data do not test this, and the app does not stop you from collecting praise for it.
Questions about the 1996 study
Does the 1996 study show that compliments make people stop working toward goals?
No. It shows that in one lab session, praise for a self-description removed both the boost and the slump that follow failure on an identity-relevant test. The students were not followed for weeks, and nobody measured whether they went on to study less. The authors themselves only speculate that heavy reliance on this kind of self-symbolizing could undermine real skill-building.
What counts as a ‘symbol of completeness’ in self-completion theory?
Anything that points to having the aspired-to identity. Brunstein and Gollwitzer list material objects such as an instrument for a musician, positive self-descriptions, influencing other people in the field, and successful performances. The theory says these are mutually substitutable, so a missing one can be covered by gaining another.
Is this the same finding as the 2009 ‘when intentions go public’ paper?
It is the same theory applied to a different situation. The 2009 paper by Gollwitzer, Sheeran, Michalski and Seifert tested whether other people noticing an identity-related intention reduced follow-through, and found that it did (Studies 1-3) and gave a premature sense of having the identity (Study 4). The 1996 study did not involve announcing anything; it involved failing a test and then receiving flattering feedback.