The Effects of Nonconscious and Conscious Goals on Performance

Abstract

The social loafing paradigm (Harkins & Szymanski, 1987) was used to examine how nonconscious motivation combines with the effects of the potential for self- and external evaluation to affect task performance. Before generating uses for a common object, participants were primed with an achievement goal or not, given one of three conscious goal instructions, and told that their outputs would be evaluated by the experimenter or not. Results suggest that the effects of the nonconscious prime are shaped by the way that the task is defined and the manner in which the participants consciously respond to these instructions.

Notes

¹Harkins et al. (2000) also manipulated the validity of the criterion. For this manipulation, half of the participants were told that the criterion of 40 uses was based on the performance of other undergraduates at their university (i.e., similar others), whereas the other half were told that the criterion was based on the performance of 3rd-year Ph.D. students (i.e., dissimilar others). Similar others provide a valid criterion, whereas dissimilar others do not. However, the effects of this manipulation are not directly relevant for the current experiment and, therefore, are not included in the study description.

Note. Comparisons are made between experimenter evaluation/do-your-best and theother conditions.

^a Loafing effect. ^b Do-your-best effect. ^c Goal-setting effect.

Note. The numbers represent the predicted mean number of uses for a knife.

²Previous research using this task (e.g., Szymanski & Harkins, 1987) has shown that participants believe that they know how many uses they have generated and are accurate in their estimates. As a result, on this particular task, it is not necessary to provide participants with feedback to ensure that they know their output.

Note. Standard deviations are in parentheses.

³The overall ANOVA yielded an Experimenter Evaluation × Instruction interaction, F(2, 159) = 3.63, p < .05, d = .44; and main effects for experimenter evaluation, F(1, 159) = 7.72, p < .01, d = .44; instructions, F (2, 159) = 13.51, p < .001, d = .58; and priming, F(1, 159) = 6.37, p < .05, d = .40.

Note. Standard deviations are in parentheses.