"Partying the night before a big exam. Preparing last-minute for a work presentation. Running a 5K in a 10-pound Halloween costume. All are examples of what psychologists call "self-handicapping" - creating obstacles to success to order to bolster or protect one's own reputation. "It's actually very common," said Yang Xiang, a psychology Ph.D. candidate in the Kenneth C. Griffin Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. "There have been many decades of work documenting this behavior.""
"Xiang and her co-authors have devised a formal, mathematical model of how the phenomenon works socially. Their "signaling theory of self-handicapping," recently published in the journal Cognition, identifies the situational factors that motivate the behavior - and charts its impacts on different kinds of observers. "We're saying that regardless of what kind of person you are, this can be a very rational thing to do," Xiang said. "We can predict when you would do it and when you would not do it.""
Self-handicapping involves deliberately creating obstacles to success to bolster or protect reputation, with common examples including partying before exams or last-minute preparation. Much prior work has emphasized personality differences and used questionnaires to gauge individual propensity to self-handicap. A formal mathematical model called the signaling theory of self-handicapping identifies situational factors that motivate the behavior and maps its effects on different observers. The model predicts when individuals will adopt self-handicapping strategies regardless of stable personality traits. The Collaborative Utility Calculus framework describes how people navigate collaboration by inferring others' abilities and expectations.
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