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Inquiring about Loss Aversion of Achievement Value

According to the achievement motivation theory, in achievement context, students may have to not only approach success/gain (e.g., strive to get a better grade) but also avoid failure/loss (e.g., avoid performing worse). However, these two types of achievement motivation have often been investigated...

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Autor principal: Wu, Chung-Chin
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: MDPI 2023
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10215568/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/37232637
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/bs13050400
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author Wu, Chung-Chin
author_facet Wu, Chung-Chin
author_sort Wu, Chung-Chin
collection PubMed
description According to the achievement motivation theory, in achievement context, students may have to not only approach success/gain (e.g., strive to get a better grade) but also avoid failure/loss (e.g., avoid performing worse). However, these two types of achievement motivation have often been investigated separately. In contrast, loss aversion, a central argument in prospect theory, posits that avoiding losses has a greater impact on preferences than does approaching gains; suggesting that gain approach and loss avoidance should be treated as asymmetric forces that can be analyzed simultaneously to study approach to gain and avoidance to loss among students in terms of grades. The main purposes of this study were to propose an alternative measure to frame the dynamic evaluation process in the context of achievement that considers students’ sensitivity to performance change, and to further investigate students’ loss aversion in relation to grades through intrapersonal and interpersonal comparisons. A total of 41 and 72 college students participated in study 1 and study 2, respectively. One-way repeated measure ANOVA was conducted for the former sample while the single sample t-tests and independent sample ANOVA were used for the latter. Through the implementation of this alternative measure, the results revealed that (1) college students were more sensitive to performance changes than to their current or final performance, and (2) loss aversion was dependent on the referents. Students were averse to interpersonal loss, but not to intrapersonal loss. These findings indicate the usefulness of the proposed measure for investigating the asymmetric responses between two types of achievement motivation, and the proposed measure can be used to extend and revise the explanatory boundaries of prospect theory and self-discrepancy theory.
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spelling pubmed-102155682023-05-27 Inquiring about Loss Aversion of Achievement Value Wu, Chung-Chin Behav Sci (Basel) Brief Report According to the achievement motivation theory, in achievement context, students may have to not only approach success/gain (e.g., strive to get a better grade) but also avoid failure/loss (e.g., avoid performing worse). However, these two types of achievement motivation have often been investigated separately. In contrast, loss aversion, a central argument in prospect theory, posits that avoiding losses has a greater impact on preferences than does approaching gains; suggesting that gain approach and loss avoidance should be treated as asymmetric forces that can be analyzed simultaneously to study approach to gain and avoidance to loss among students in terms of grades. The main purposes of this study were to propose an alternative measure to frame the dynamic evaluation process in the context of achievement that considers students’ sensitivity to performance change, and to further investigate students’ loss aversion in relation to grades through intrapersonal and interpersonal comparisons. A total of 41 and 72 college students participated in study 1 and study 2, respectively. One-way repeated measure ANOVA was conducted for the former sample while the single sample t-tests and independent sample ANOVA were used for the latter. Through the implementation of this alternative measure, the results revealed that (1) college students were more sensitive to performance changes than to their current or final performance, and (2) loss aversion was dependent on the referents. Students were averse to interpersonal loss, but not to intrapersonal loss. These findings indicate the usefulness of the proposed measure for investigating the asymmetric responses between two types of achievement motivation, and the proposed measure can be used to extend and revise the explanatory boundaries of prospect theory and self-discrepancy theory. MDPI 2023-05-10 /pmc/articles/PMC10215568/ /pubmed/37232637 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/bs13050400 Text en © 2023 by the author. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
spellingShingle Brief Report
Wu, Chung-Chin
Inquiring about Loss Aversion of Achievement Value
title Inquiring about Loss Aversion of Achievement Value
title_full Inquiring about Loss Aversion of Achievement Value
title_fullStr Inquiring about Loss Aversion of Achievement Value
title_full_unstemmed Inquiring about Loss Aversion of Achievement Value
title_short Inquiring about Loss Aversion of Achievement Value
title_sort inquiring about loss aversion of achievement value
topic Brief Report
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10215568/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/37232637
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/bs13050400
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