Perfectionism and self-handicapping in adult education

This study analyzes the relationship between perfectionism and self-handicapping at the level of university students. Maladaptative perfectionism deals with setting high standards, but view themselves as never seeming to meet their own high expectations (Pacht, 1984). Academic self-handicapping refers to the use of impediments to successful performance on academic tasks. Most researchers agree that the reason people self-handicap is to protect themselves from the negative implications of failure. There are no gender differences as regards the use of self-handicapping. The correlations among the variables revealed that, when the whole sample was considered, self-handicapping was positively related to perfectionism and negatively to academic achievement. This is in line with previous research (Hobden & Pliner, 1995; Sherry et al., 2001; Zuckerman, Kieffer, & Knee, 1998). The link between these two constructs is not unexpected since they both deal with people's concerns about standards, levels of competence and how people are perceived by others. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licences/by-nc-nd/3.0/).