Motivation and future temporal orientation: a test of the self-handicapping hypothesis

Self-handicapping motivation refers to the likelihood a person will project personal ambition into the future, make a pessimistic judgement, and then mobilise effort in the present to avoid an anticipated negative outcome. It should, therefore, be a correlate of future time perspective. This study showed for a sample of 120 first-year students that, whilst future time perspective did strongly predict scores on a measure of self-handicapping motivation, neither variable was a useful predictor of outcome.