The purpose of this study was to investigate whether an individual's self-esteem would effect the amount of effort that person expected to expend in a task performing situation with an evaluator. Two social psychological principles of an individual's self-perception, the self-esteem and self-consistency theories, were the theoretical concepts upon which this study was based.The 403 subjects were undergraduates at Ball State University, Muncie, Indiana. The study was conducted during the winter of 1980.Subjects were administered two self-report questionnaires measuring self-esteem and locus of control. High and low self-esteem groups, each containing 70 subjects, were selected for participation in phase two.Prior to meeting with the evaluator, each subject was given a verbal cue regarding the evaluator's demandingness. Each subject was asked to determine the number of practice problems to be done in presentation for a task. The number of problems chosen constituted the amount of effort the individual expected to expend, or the dependent variable.Using a univariate analysis of variance, the data analysis showed a statistically significant interaction between the self-esteem and evaluator demandingness factors for the male sample. Four null sub-hypotheses were also rejected for the male sample. Due to lack of homogeneity of variance in the female sample, four revised null subhypotheses were tested using a non-parametric procedure, the KruskalWallis Rank Sums. Each of these sub-hypotheses was rejected for the female sample.As a result of the data analysis, the following conclusions were made: (1) High self-esteem individuals expected to expend more effort with a difficult-to-please evaluator than with an easy-to-please evaluator, and (2) conversely, low self-esteem individuals expected to expend more effort with an easy-to-please evaluator than with a difficult-to-please evaluator. The findings of this study support self-esteem theory.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:BSU/oai:cardinalscholar.bsu.edu:handle/180382 |
| Date | January 1982 |
| Creators | Sackett, Suzanne |
| Contributors | Dunham, Morton D. |
| Source Sets | Ball State University |
| Detected Language | English |
| Format | ix, 163 leaves : ill. ; 28 cm. |
| Source | Virtual Press |
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