Effect of extrinsic incentives on use of test anxiety as an anticipatory attributional defense: playing it cool when the stakes are high.

We conducted an experiment to assess the effect of extrinsic incentives on the use of test anxiety as a self-handicapping strategy. We hypothesized that although reports of anxiety may be greater when such symptoms can serve a defensive function, this effect occurs only when extrinsic incentives are low and not under conditions of high extrinsic incentive. Eighty-four male undergraduates anticipated taking a test of intellectual abilities and either were led to believe that test anxiety has no effect on test performance or were given no particular information about the relation between test anxiety and performance. Subjects were offered either +5 or +25 for obtaining the highest score on the test. Consistent with predictions, no-information subjects reported greater test anxiety before the test than did those who believed that test anxiety was unrelated to performance, but only when the extrinsic incentive for performance was low. However, these subjects did not report greater cognitive interference or exhibit lower test scores than did subjects in other conditions. It is tentatively suggested that the defensive strategy used by these subjects consisted of altering perceptions of anxiety, rather than anxiety itself. The implications of the absence of self-handicapping under high incentive conditions are discussed.