From Stefan Balke (960513.1500 CET)
Bill Powers (960509.0940 MDT)
But I take your point: some truths are about the state of the
system itself.
And here the door is open for the problem how to distinguish between an ex
post rationalization (which is mostly a selfworth defending invention) and
"going up a level" and "looking down".
Yes, I would agree with that, and with your translation into PCT. In
fact, isn't this true of all criteria? A perception pertaining to an
external or internal state of affairs is just a report on what is being
experienced. There's nothing in such a report to indicate the preferred
level or kind of experience. Perceptions have no value except in
comparison with an internal reference standard.
I agree completly.
This tells you something but not everything about what the participants
perceive as "success." As you found out, the _desired_ amount of success
was not a fixed score; it depended on previous performance. So you were
starting to look at a higher level of control, which adjusted the target
score defining success in order to control some higher-level perception.
It would be interesting to find out what that higher level of perception
is.
I the view of Ferdinand Hoppe (1931, Erfolg und Misserfolg, Psychologische
Forschung, 14, 1-62) the higher level is the so called Ich-Niveau, which
could be translated as self-worth or self concept of ability. I think that
he was quite right. A success at a difficult task leads to an increase in
the self-concept of ability (at the level of principles) and a failure will
lead to a decrease in self-concept of ability. The self-worth seems to be at
a still higher level (level of system concepts). There are some remarkable
results about the stability of the self-worth in a long term study of
Bachman, O'Maley and Johnston (1978, Youth in transition; vol. 6. Ann Arbor,
MI: Institute for Social Research). They reported stability coefficients
(kind of test-retest correlations) for the self-worth ratings (using the
Rosenberg self-esteem scale) of 1628 young adults of about s=.82 upto s=.91
for the period of 8 years. This means that the self-worth or self-esteem
seems to be a controlled variable for many persons.
Perhaps "desired score" and "success" are not at the same level. If a
person says "I want a score of X," and then makes a score considerably
below that level, simply having failed to make the desired score,
whatever it is, is a sign of failure. However, if the person makes a
much higher score than stated, again this is a failure (of a different
kind) because the person did not correctly estimate his actual score.
Of course, this are to different cases, but the last one will not lead to an
decrease in self-worth, because the ability to perform well is obviously
higher than expected and this will be a win for the self-worth.
So at one level, the person tries to achieve a "level of aspiration"
relative to a chosen score and reports success in terms of whether the
actual score is below or above the current level of aspiration. At
another level, the person is trying to adjust the level of aspiration
for a score so that there will be success at the lower level, but not a
great deal more success than predicted. At the second level, the "level
of aspiration" has to do with accurate prediction, not with making any
particular score. Does that make sense?
Yes, it makes sense. This is exactly the idea that Julian Rotter (1942) used
for his studies with the level of aspiration board.
Best, Stefan