‘Feeling bad’ or ‘being bad?’ The trapping effect of effort in academic failure in a Confucian cultural context

Abstract

A predicament faced by students who fail academically in East Asian Confucian societies, such as Taiwan, is being obscured by students’ outstanding performances in international academic assessments. This article proposes that there is a trapping effect of effort for these students. They are trapped in a dilemma between ‘feeling bad’ (emotional distress) for exerting too much effort and ‘being bad’ (negative image) for making little effort. Such a dilemma may be worse in the domain of academic achievement than in non-academic domains like the arts, with the former being more directly related to children’s dutiful fulfilment of parental expectations. Two consecutive studies – a scenario experiment with 700 subjects and a survey on past experiences of failure with a sample of 190 – were conducted. The results supported our hypothesis that effort becomes a double-edged sword for students who failed. They are more likely to either ‘feel bad’ or ‘be bad’ after failing academically compared to performing poorly on non-academic activities. Implications of the findings are further discussed.

Keywords:

• Effort
• emotional distress
• negative image
• academic achievement
• Confucian culture

Notes

1. Please note that the Levene’s test for equality of variances was found to be significant, therefore a t statistic not assuming homogeneity of variance was computed.