What are the Odds?
If I were to ask you before your next race or competition,
"What are the odds of your performing your best?"
what would you tell me? What factors would you take into consideration? How hard you trained over the last few months? Obstacles in your training and preparation efforts the week before the competition?
Would you give me honest odds, or would you underestimate your readiness? If you said you would down-grade your odds of success, your not alone.
In the world of Sports Psychology this is called dispositional self-handicapping. The phenomenon goes as follows: when preparing for competition, we are highly motivated to protect our self-esteem from any negative implications of a possible failure. We may claim a handicap, such as poor practices, too many outside obligations, not feeling well, bad nutrition that is sufficient to excuse an anticipated poor performance but does not directly impede our effort or ablity to compete in the moment.
If we do not perform well, self-handicapping will have the desired effect of obscuring the cause of our poor performance. Rather than lack of ability, we can credit any of the "handicaps" as the reason for not doing well.
But even more important, if we perform well in spite of our self-handicapping, the implications for our ability are even more positive than if we performed under normal circumstances. How much better must we be if we could perform our best despite our handicaps?
Daniel Bailis at the University of Manitoba wanted to see whether the costs of self-handicapping, outweighed the benefits, or visa-versa. He studies university swimmers and wrestlers over the course of four months of competition. He found that athletes' dispositional self-handicapping was positively related to performance and self-reports of optimal experience in competitions. Bailis concluded that while self-handicapping has been conceived as a way of escaping evaluative pressure, specifically by arranging unfavourable conditions for performance in advance, after
over four months of observations, this research found no consistent evidence of possible negative consequences, but reliable evidence of possitive ones, for athlete's emotions and performance during competition.
Interestingly, self-handicapping is contrary to many mental preparation techniques that sport psychologist typically advise (for example positive self-talk). However, this makes sense when we recognize that the primary goal of dispositional self-handicapping is not enhancing performance. Rather, it is the protecting ourselves against the loss of self-esteem or embarrassment in public.