The Role of Internal and External Sources of Evaluation in Motivating Task Performance

White, Kjelgaard, and Harkins (1995) found that participants asked to strive to achieve a stringent criterion outperformed participants asked to do their best (a goal-setting effect). However, the goal-setting effect occurred only when participants were subject to experimenter evaluation. Participants not subject to experimenter evaluation performed no better than experimenter evaluation participants who were asked to do their best. In the current research, Experiments 1 and 2 suggest that this do-your-best level of performance results from the no-experimenter evaluation participants use of the stringent criterion as a yardstick against which they can compare their performance. Although these experiments show that the potential for self-evaluation can motivate performance, Experiment 3 shows that self-evaluation does not contribute to the goal-setting effect; the potential for experimenter evaluation alone is responsible for this effect. Taken together, these findings advance our understanding of the interplay between internal and external sources of evaluation in motivating task performance.