Understanding Positive Attitudes toward Helping Peers: The Role of Mastery Goals and Academic Self-Efficacy

The present research was designed to document the relationship between mastery and performance goals and attitudes toward helping others, and to test the mediating role of self-efficacy. Two experiments (Studies 1 and 2) showed that students with mastery goals hold stronger positive attitudes toward helping peers, relative to students with performance goals. Furthermore, a field study (Study 3) indicated that students' mastery goals were positively related to holding positive attitudes toward helping fellow students, whereas performance goals were not. Studies 2 and 3 indicated that this could be explained by the intra-individual process of academic self-efficacy. Finally, it was shown that a negative relationship existed between performance goals and helping peers only for individuals with relatively weak mastery goals.