engleski

Is there a construct within a person without the person's competence?

Theory and research (Wicklund, and Braun, 1990 ; Wicklund, and Koller, 1991 ; Wicklund, Braun, and Waibel, 1994) suggest that people, when incompetent in a certain area, strive towards coherency contained in the traits or physical aspects assigned to experts in those areas. In example, when incompetent in tennis or math, people tend to describe expert tennis players or expert mathematicians using consistent person descriptors. In order to test this idea, focusing on the coherencies among components of the subject’ s own orientations vis-&agrave ; ; -vis a concrete activity/object, two studies were designed. Additionally, the second study had the objective of examining the relationship between the person’ s evaluations of the object in question and overt behavior in the area, within the context of competence/incompetence in the particular realm. It was hypothesized that the incompetent person’ s evaluations would be highly internally consistent, and that the incompetent person would not be able to relate different aspects of evaluations to behavioral intentions and to actual performance. Participants in the first study were 116 students of the University of Trieste. The issue of interest was the advantage of sexual relations outside an ongoing relationship. In a 2X2 design, subjects were divided (1) into two groups according to their amount of past experience in the issue, and (2) half of them were given an active role, and the other half a passive role, in confronting the issue. Following the manipulation, participants’ liking of, agreement with, and intention to use the proposed idea were measured. Participants in the second study were 64 students, approached individually, and assigned by chance to either the Active or Passive condition. Those in the Active condition were offered the chance to taste an exotic sweet, which was the object of interest, while Passive participants could only see the sweet without tasting it. Then, participants’ evaluations of the outer and inner qualities of the sweet, their intention to eat the sweet in the future, and the evaluation and description of people from the country where the sweet came from were measured. Observed eating behavior at the time participants thought the experiment was over was used as a measure of overt behavior. Correlations between attitudinal elements regarding the area/object were higher for the incompetent subjects. Further, as resulting from t-test analyses, the evaluative basis of one’ s behavioral intention was the same as the evaluative basis of one’ s behavior only for the competent participants. The results thus indicate that a sense of insecurity in an area, based on lack of experience and on one’ s passive role in the area, leads to a person’ s creating strong coherencies among the cognitive aspects of that same area. Such incompetence also implies an inability to understand the evaluative bases of one’ s actual behavior. Results are discussed in the context of Campbell and Fiske’ s (1959) notion that holding a psychological construct is best evidenced by the emergence of modest correlations among the indicators of the concept as opposed to high correlations. In line with this notion, it seems that the best way to instill a construct in a person is to give that person training in performing in the area, which is in accord with internalization research (e.g. Deci and Ryan, 1985 ; Wicklund, 1989). In such a way, the person brings the construct to life and no longer separates it from actual performance.

attitude; competence; consistency

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