Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Objective Self-awareness Theory (Duval & Wicklund,1972) proposes that self-evaluation increases an individual’sawareness of any discrepancy between their currentperformance and an internal goal. In the current study weprompted self-evaluation throughout an intelligence test(Analysis-Synthesis Test – AST) using confidence ratings(CR). AST performance, the extent to which participantsincidentally learnt task-relevant rules (learning rules wasunnecessary because they were provided), self-efficacy, andgoals, were assessed. The results indicated an effect ofperforming CR on both performance and rule learning, butthe effect depended on self-efficacy. Compared to matchedcontrols (n=45), participants who performed CR (n=41) andhad high self-efficacy performed better on the AST butlearnt fewer rules. Performing CR had no effect onparticipants low in self-efficacy. This suggests that self-evaluation interacts with self-efficacy to modifyparticipants’ goals, specifically CR appear to shiftindividuals high in self-efficacy from a mastery goal to aperformance goal.