DEFENSIVE PESSIMISM: A COVER FOR SELF-PROTECTION

 

DEFENSIVE PESSIMISM: A COVER FOR SELF-PROTECTION

In day to day life, few people dare to admit and acknowledge their mistakes when they encounter failures. Rather, most of the people love playing the “Blame” game. They would try ways and means to excuse themselves and without any hesitation they would say: “It’s not my fault.” But when they encountered success, they would take pride in telling the world: “It’s all my sole efforts.” So, different persons construct different strategies to declare their innocence in protecting their own ego.

Nancy Cantor coined the term “Defensive pessimism”. This term refers to the strategy of the mind in which people termed as Defensive Pessimists set unrealistically low expectations for themselves and their performance ability. This setting of low expectations is done specifically before engaging in any risky situation with the intention of preparing themselves for the “potential failure” and thus intrinsically get themselves motivated for hard-work, so that failure can be escaped. In every defensive pessimist, burns a strong desire for success and fear of failure. They cannot dream of tarnishing and eroding away their own self-esteem by failure. They are thus always haunted by anxiety and nervousness before entering any risky situation, say academic exams. But what is interesting to know about them is this: anxiety is being used by them as the motivating factor pushing them to work hard (Guth, 2018) and thus achieve higher than the level they have set for themselves. In this way, they are protecting their own self-esteem from social defamation.

Defensive Pessimism is a “cognitive strategy”: a strategy which narrates how people dispose themselves in order to get their goals or their tasks in life fulfilled (Norem, 1989). It gives a description of what the individual is expecting, appraising, planning as he pursues his intended goal (Norem, 1989). It is due to the existence of the goals formulated that the strategies are simultaneously developed. Thus the same individual may use different strategies as he strives towards achieving his goal. This implies that an individual in one situation may resort to the use of defensive pessimism, in another situation he may use strategic optimism, and some other strategy in a third.

Goals direct one’s attention and action and lead to higher performance (Guth, 2018). That is the reason why goals are set. Time and again, children are being asked by their teachers to discover their aim in life (goal). This is done to make them understand that having an aim in life is a must for achieving improvement at every stage of their life. Setting a goal is also a prerequisite for success and higher performance till the goal is reached. Thus, the higher the goal set, the higher will be the performance (Guth, 2018).  Of course, we cannot deny the fact that the Defensive Pessimists do also set goals for themselves. But what differentiates them from others is this: They set very low goals, low expectations, and low performance levels for themselves (Guth, 2018).  For the Defensive Pessimists, setting low expectations is done with the motive of avoiding failure rather than aiming for success (Guth, 2018). They cannot think of plunging themselves into the ocean of failure. They cannot think of losing or distorting their image by failure. They are rather anxious and nervous all the time because they fear failure (Norem & Cantor, 1986). Ironically, they use failure to motivate themselves to attain goals that are much higher than those they have set for themselves (Parra, 2009).

            Defensive pessimists harness anxiety to motivate them to achieve higher (Parra, 2009). These people might have not failed in their life. Rather, their past was full of success and high achievements (Eliot, 2003). They might have even performed better than the optimists. But whenever they are entering any risky situation, say an upcoming exam, they would be always be nervous and anxious and repeatedly insist that they are going to fail. They hold firmly to the conviction that they are sure to perform poorly in that upcoming event. Any sort of encouragement and reinforcement from their friends will only lead them to experience more anxiety and confusion. None of what their friends say or do, can give them the conviction that things will not happen the way they expect.

Having anxiety is a must for the Defensive Pessimists because it motivates them to perform better in their tasks (Guth, 2018; Parra, 2009). In other words, anxiety boosts their performance. If the ‘anxiety’ element is absent, it is quite sure that they will not be able to do well in the upcoming task. Rather their performance will for sure suffer. Thus, before undertaking any task, they will brood over their performance and foresee themselves encountering with failure. In this way, a feeling of anxiety is developed. They will repeatedly say to themselves: “I am afraid……I will fail in this task”. Thus, they will use this feeling of anxiety as a motivating factor and will resultantly make plans and strategies to avoid confronting with failures (Guth, 2018; Parra, 2009). This is concretely done by setting low targets for themselves, targets that are easily achievable.

Everyone, in one way or the other, experiences anxiety in his life. This particularly happens when he is dealing with a situation that involves a lot of risk and sacrifice. Anxiety is generally believed to disrupt the performance (Wong, 2013), unless it is well managed and skillfully coped with. According to Eysenck and Calvo (1992), anxiety often weakens performance especially under test conditions. A highly-anxious person has the tendency to perform poorly than the one with low test anxiety. For Wine (1971), the difference between a person who has high level of anxiety and one whose level of anxiety is low is marked by the loss of focus in the task at hand. But the defensive pessimists utilize anxiety as a means to motivate themselves in preparation for examinations (Norem & Cantor, 1986).

Thus we see that anxiety plays a very important role in the life of the defensive pessimists. Without anxiety, it might be impossible for the defensive pessimists to perform better in their tasks. It on account of this anxiety that at times they are able to outperform the optimists. For the optimists, anxiety might be a disturbing and unpleasant factor which may thwart their progress towards the achievement of the goal. Thus they would try different ways and means how to cope with the anxiety and stress. But for the defensive pessimists, anxiety is a necessity. It is motivating factor for better performance and so they use it to their advantage.  If the defensive pessimists are able to protect their self-worth and preserve their image from getting distorted, it is all because of the anxiety. This element of anxiety motivates them for hard work and helps them to avoid failure.

 

REFERENCES:

 

Eliot, Andrew J. (2003). “A Motivational Analysis of Defensive Pessimism and Self-Handicapping”. Journey of Personality. 71(3), 370 – 396.

Eysenck, W. Michael & Calvo, Manuel G. (1992) “Anxiety and Performance: The Processing Efficiency Theory”. Cognition and Emotion. 6(6), 409 - 434.

Guth, E. A. (2018). “Defensive Pessimism and Goal Setting”. College of Science and Health Theses and Dissertations. 265.

Norem, J.K. & Cantor, N. (1986) “Defensive Pessimism: Harnessing anxiety as motivation”. Journal of Personality and social Psychology. Vol. 51, No. 6, 1208 – 1217.

Norem, J.K. & Cantor, N. (1989) “Defensive Pessimism and Stress and Coping”. Social Cognition. Vol. 7, No. 2, 1989, 92-112.

Parra, E. L. (2009). “The Effect of Encouragement on Defensive Pessimism as an Anxiety Amplifier”. Social and Personality Psychology.

Wong, I.Y. “The Impact of Anxiety on Processing Efficiency: Implications for the Attentional Control Theory.” The Open Behavioural Science Journal. 7(6), 7 – 15.