Achievement motives and individual differences in situational specificity of behavior

Based on the different images projected by research on high- and low-anxious individuals and on the kinship between the anxiety concept and the motive-to-avoid-failure concept, differences between achievement-oriented and failure-threatened individuals in responsiveness to situational variation were predicted. 167 Norwegian 7th graders participated and were administered the Achievement Motives Scale. The hypothesis received support from persistence data from 2 situations: The intraindividual variation in persistence (time) across the situations was greater among achievement-oriented than among failure-threatened Ss. These differences could not be explained by achievement motivation theory. Results also illustrate that there was no inherent contradiction between high intraindividual variability and high correlations between behavior measures from different situations. (39 ref)