Difficulty and diagnosticity as determinants of choice among tasks

Performed a Bayesian analysis of attributions of ability made from success or failure. If people are primarily interested in maximizing the information they gain about themselves, they should prefer easy or hard tasks to moderate difficulty ones when the easy or the hard tasks are made more diagnostic of their true ability. If people are primarily interested in maximizing the simple expected value of success, they should prefer intermediate difficulty tasks regardless of diagnosticity. Data from 120 male undergraduates strongly support the idea that diagnosticity is the major determinant of preference among achievement tasks and suggests that it should be a basic parameter in all research on self- and social attribution.