Success Leads to Agentic Cognition: Two Field Studies

Abstract

Not much is known about the cognitive consequences of success and failure, and there is no comprehensive theory explaining their aftermath. Building on a dual-perspective model of social cognition, we offer such a preliminary theory that assumes that experiencing success induces an agentic perspective, whereas experiencing failure induces a recipient perspective. We present two field studies of persons failing or succeeding at their naturally occurring goals. The studies found that the experience of success was accompanied by heightened accessibility and use of agentic content. The experience of failure resulted in lowered mood and self-esteem.

Keywords

success failure agency communion self-esteem

Success and failure are important and frequent experiences of everyday life, and deservedly, they are a common topic of psychological research. Numerous studies have shown that whereas success leads to increases in mood and positive emotions, failure results in a decreased mood (Nummenmaa & Niemi, 2004). Success and failure have similar effects on self-esteem (Fry, 1976). It is also well known that both success and failure are accompanied by self-serving attributions: Whereas people attribute their failures to external factors, they attribute their successes to internal ones (Mezulis, Abramson, Hyde, & Hankin, 2004). Most studies on the consequences of failure and success focus on affective variables; in the present work, we delineate a model that also takes into account crucial cognitive variables.

Consequences of Success and Failure

There is an emerging agreement that social cognition involves two basic content dimensions: agency or competence (concerning goal completion and task functioning) and communion (concerning warmth, morality, and social functioning; Fiske, Cuddy, & Glick, 2007; Wojciszke, 2005). This duality of content is explained by the ubiquity of two perspectives in human social interaction: that of an agent and that of a recipient. An agent is a person who performs an action, focuses on goal achievement, and perceives the world in agentic categories, whereas a recipient is a person who is focused on experiencing the consequences of others’ actions and perceives the world in communal categories (Abele & Wojciszke, 2014). A large number of studies has shown that taking the agent perspective (when thinking about self or close others) results in the dominance of agentic categories in social perception, while taking the recipient perspective (when thinking about unrelated others) results in the dominance of communal categories in social perception. For example, self-esteem is dominated by agentic over communal information (Gebauer, Wagner, Sedikides, & Neberich, 2013; Wojciszke, Baryla, Parzuchowski, Szymkow, & Abele, 2011), while impression formation is dominated by communal over agentic information (Goodwin, Piazza, & Rozin, 2014; Wojciszke, Bazinska, & Jaworski, 1998).

We assume that experiencing success induces the agent perspective, whereas experiencing failure induces the recipient perspective. This is because successful performance in a task increases self-efficacy beliefs, which subsequently lead to a higher expectancy of success and enhanced efforts, resulting in improved outcomes (Bandura, 2001). Although self-efficacy beliefs are typically measured as highly contextualized beliefs in one’s own mastery in a specific task, there are also more recent data showing that success results in an increase in perceived self-agency, whereas failure results in decreased perceptions of one’s own agency (Abele, Rupprecht, & Wojciszke, 2008). In the present work, we want to go one step further by showing that success leads to agentic thinking not only about oneself but also about others and the social world in general.

Present Research

Experimental studies are usually considered the best method for psychological research because they allow causal inferences due to (1) manipulation of independent variables, (2) random assignments of participants for experimental conditions, and (3) the researcher’s control of the study settings. However, each of these three advantages of experiment rises important theoretical concerns (Bless & Burger, 2016). For example, random assignment is incompatible with self-selection of a situation, and this difference is relevant for success and failure situations, as the former are typically self-selected and the latter are avoided. There is also an increasing amount of ethical doubt about manipulating information on the personal failures and successes of individual participants. The main culprit is the perseverance effect, the classical finding that persons who received negative performance feedback on “a social perceptiveness” task reported more negative self-perceptions in this domain than persons who received positive feedback, even when both were debriefed, that is, informed about the false and random nature of the feedback (Ross, Lepper, & Hubbard, 1975). Although some authors have claimed to find entirely efficient debriefing procedures (McFarland, Cheam, & Buehler, 2007), debriefing has been much more frequently used than studied in terms of its effectiveness. A recent line of four studies (Miketta & Friese, 2017) found that none of the debriefing procedures recommended in the literature could undo the harm caused by the negative feedback manipulation. Due to these theoretical and ethical considerations, instead of manipulating information on successes versus failures, we studied persons who had recently experienced naturally occurring outcomes of their actions.

In Study 1, we approached persons who had just won or lost a game of ground tennis. We measured positivity of their mood and trait self-esteem as well as accessibility and use of agentic and communal cognitions. We generally expected that successes would be accompanied by increased affect and agentic cognition, while failures would be accompanied by decreased affect and communal cognition. In Study 2, we conducted a replication switching to table tennis players and introducing the crucial measures both before and after the game. This served the purpose of deciding whether the outcome influences cognition or vice versa, for example, whether success results in agentic cognition or rather agentic cognition leads to success. Both studies were conducted in Poland.

Study 1

We approached persons who had just won or failed their tennis game and administered a short questionnaire measuring accessibility of agentic and communal content as well as a measure of their use in a task to find similarities between people. Positivity of mood and trait self-esteem was measured, as well. We expected that the successful tennis players would show an increased accessibility and use of agentic content, while the losing players would show an increased accessibility and use of communal content. Finally, we expected the former to show higher mood and self-esteem than the latter.

Method

Participants

Male nonprofessional tennis players participated immediately after they lost (n = 40) or won (n = 40) a tennis game. Their age was M = 29.59 (SD = 9.06), and their tennis experience was M = 8.16 years (SD = 8.16). We conducted power analyses using G*Power (Faul, Erdfelder, Lang, & Buchner, 2007) for expected medium to large effects of success or failure on emotional- and cognitive-dependent measures. The results suggest that given an α of .05 and a power of .80, a sample of 80 participants would be required to detect an effect size of Cohen’s d = .55 in testing the difference between the control and experimental groups.

Measures

Participants estimated their tennis playing level (1 = very low to 5 = very high) and completed a measure of mood positivity (Wojciszke & Baryla, 2005) that consisted of 2 positive items (I feel peaceful and relaxed; I feel well) and 2 negative items (I am in a bad mood; I feel down), answered on 1–5 scale (Cronbach’s α = .92). Next, they filled in Rosenberg’s (1965) Self-Esteem Scale (α = .89) and a measure of content accessibility. This measure consisted of six words with a one-letter gap that could be completed in such a way that a neutral or a communal word was formed (faithful, good, group, help, kind, and trust) and another six words that could be completed in a neutral or agentic way (effect, task, tenacious, to make, to win, and work). The numbers of words completed an agentic and communal way served as the indices of content accessibility.

Finally, participants solved a task measuring the preferential use of agentic over communal categories. This task, originally devised by Cohrs, Asbrock, and Sibley (2012), consists of 12 triplets of persons described with agentic and communal traits, and participants are to indicate which two persons of the three were most similar to one another. A sample item is “Person N is very determined and analytical but not particularly kind or sincere. Person I is very popular and sensitive but not particularly ambitious or confident. Person B is rather competitive and independent and also warm and likeable.” Choosing Persons N and B is scored 1 (for agentic choice), choosing Persons I and B is scored −1 (for communion-based choice), and choosing Persons I and N is scored 0 (for basing the choice neither on agency nor on communion). The reliability of this measure in the present study appeared rather low (α = .63).

Results

In both present studies, we used standardized mean differences between two groups of independent observations for the sample (d _s) as effect size estimators for between-participants comparisons (Cohen, 1988). We also used mean differences standardized by averaged standard deviations of both repeated measures (d _av) as effect sizes for comparisons of correlated samples (Cumming, 2012). Confidence intervals (CIs) around d _s were computed on the basis of noncentralized distributions (Cumming & Finch, 2005).

As observed in Table 1, the participants who won their game played tennis 4 years longer and evaluated their level of playing as much higher than those who lost.

Table 1.

Differences Between Winners and Losers (Study 1).

Measures	Losers	Winners	t	d _s [LL, UL]	p
Measures	M (SD)	M (SD)	t	d _s [LL, UL]	p
Tennis experience (years)	6.13 (3.98)	10.20 (5.09)	3.99	0.89 [0.44, 1.34]	.001
Playing level (self-assessed)	3.38 (0.70)	4.33 (0.66)	6.24	1.39 [0.95, 1.84]	.001
Agency accessibility	4.08 (1.14)	4.63 (0.93)	2.37	0.53 [0.08, 0.98]	.020
Communion accessibility	3.80 (1.18)	4.05 (1.06)	1.00	0.22 [−0.22, 0.67]	.322
Agentic content use	−0.21 (0.30)	0.30 (0.30)	7.75	1.73 [1.29, 2.18]	.001
Mood	3.56 (1.04)	4.65 (0.60)	5.74	1.28 [0.84, 1.72]	.001
Trait self-esteem	2.82 (0.54)	3.39 (0.38)	5.64	1.24 [0.79, 1.69]	.001

Note. UL = upper limit; LL = lower limit.

Cognitive Consequences

Consistent with the expectation that success leads to agentic cognition, winners showed a higher accessibility of agentic content (M = 4.63) than losers (M = 4.08), and this effect was moderate (d _s = 0.53). Although there were no differences in the communion content accessibility, the winners also showed an increased use of agentic content in perceptions of similarity, and this effect was large (d _s = 1.73). One sample t test comparing the use of agentic categories (M = 0.30) to zero (lack of preference) appeared highly significant, t(39) = 6.38, p < .001. This a clear inversion of the typical pattern of dominance of communal over agentic categories in perceiving similarities among people found by Cohrs et al. (2012), in line with a large amount of data showing that interpersonal perception is generally dominated by the communal over agentic content (see Abele & Wojciszke, 2014, for review).

Interestingly, the influence of objective outcomes on category use was significantly moderated by the subjective feeling of success, as tapped by the self-assessment of tennis playing level. The introduction of the outcome by self-assessment interaction increased R ² by .035, F(1, 76) = 5.12, p = .027. As illustrated in Figure 1, the winners who highly assessed their level of playing showed much a stronger tendency to use agentic categories than those who assessed their playing as low. Moreover, these subjective assessments influenced the perceptions of winners but not those of losers who uniformly based their perceptions of similarities on communal categories (M = −0.21), and this preference differed significantly from zero, t(39) = −4.57, p < .001. This suggests that failure is associated with communal cognition. On the other hand, we did not find increased accessibility of communal categories among losers (Table 1), nor did we find that subjective perceptions of failure moderated the use of communal categories (left side of Figure 1). Losers’ communal content use was also much weaker than the value reported by Cohrs et al. (2012), which was −0.47 for a study without any manipulation. This leads to conclusions that although success is strongly and consistently related to agentic cognition, failure tends to be related with communal cognition, though in a weaker and less consistent way.

Figure 1.

Self-assessed level of playing moderates the influence of objective outcome on the use of agentic versus communal categories in similarities perception (Study 1).

Affective Consequences

Finally, as illustrated in the lower panels of Table 1, the winners showed much a higher mood (d _s = 1.28) and self-esteem (d _s = 1.24) than losers. Both of these effects were large and consistent with the previously discussed data on affective consequences of success and failure.

Study 2

Although the Study 1 produced results that strongly suggested that success makes people more agentic in their cognition, the Study 1 was purely correlational, which raises the obvious question about causation: Does success makes people agentic, or do agentic people succeed more frequently? To address this problem, we conducted another study where the tendency to use agentic categories in the perception of similarities and other variables were measured both before and after experiencing the outcome. To extend the ecological validity, we also changed the population studied, switching from ground tennis to table tennis players.

Method

Participants

Eighty nonprofessional table tennis players (53 women) participated, aged M = 24.71 (SD = 5.50). Their tennis experience was M = 11.49 years (SD = 4.49).

Overview and Measures

This study consisted of two sessions. The first took place before and the second immediately after a tennis game. In the first session, participants solved the task measuring the preferential use of agentic over communal categories. The task consisted of six triplets of persons originally devised by Cohrs et al. (2012) and four similar triplets devised by us. Then, participants filled in a 4-item measure of positivity of mood, the same as that used in the previous study. Finally, they answered a single item concerning their current self-esteem: At this moment, my self-esteem is high (from 1 = definitely disagree to 7 = definitely agree).

In the second session, participants solved the second task, which measured the preferential use of agentic over communal categories. This task also consisted of six triplets of persons devised by Cohrs et al. (2012) and four similar triplets devised by us. Then, participants filled in another 4-item measure of positivity of mood, which was parallel to the one used in the first session (developed by Wojciszke & Baryla, 2005) and once more answered the single-item measure of current self-esteem. Next, participants assessed their ability to act (5 items: to plan, to act in thoughtful way, to self-control, to influence what is happening, and to realize my own goals) as well as their ability to experience (to feel pleasure, fear, pain, and joy and to perceive others’ emotions). Each item was answered on a scale ranging from 0 (not at all) to 6 (very much). The content of the items was selected from the works of Gray and colleagues on the two dimensions of mind perception (e.g., Gray, Young, & Waytz, 2012). Finally, participants answered sociodemographic questions and assessed their level of tennis playing (1 = very low to 5 = very high).

The reliabilities of the measures were satisfactory, and the Cronbach’s αs are shown in Table 2. The initial forms of both (pregame and postgame) measures of the use of agentic categories showed low reliabilities; this problem was fixed by removing 3 items that decreased the reliability of the whole scales. In effect, both the pregame and postgame tendencies to use agentic categories were measured with 7 items.

Table 2.

Differences Between Winners and Losers Before and After a Game (Study 2, Cronbach’s α Are Given in Parentheses).

Measures and pre- vs. postgame comparisons	Losers	Winners	t _between	d _s [LL, UL]	p
Measures and pre- vs. postgame comparisons	M (SD)	M (SD)	t _between	d _s [LL, UL]	p
Tennis experience	11.19 (5.42)	11.80 (3.35)	0.61	0.14 [−0.31, 0.58]	.545
Playing level	3.34 (0.68)	4.00 (0.72)	3.70***	0.83 [0.38, 1.27]	.001
Agency use
Pregame (.71)	−0.31 (0.54)	−0.32 (0.51)	0.06	−0.01 [−0.46, 0.43]	.952
Postgame (.82)	−0.41 (0.57)	−0.10 (0.64)	2.30*	0.52 [0.07, 0.96]	.025
t _within	0.94	2.30*
d _av [LL, UL]	−0.17 [−0.52, 0.19]	0.36 [0.04, 0.68]
p	.352	.027
Self-assessed ability
To act (.81)	3.62 (1.43)	4.23 (0.79)	2.33*	0.52 [0.07, 0.97]	.022
To experience (.64)	2.74 (1.04)	3.21 (0.51)	1.86	0,42 [−0.03, 0.86]	.067
Mood
Pregame (.64)	3.82 (0.76)	4.17 (0.54)	2.36*	0.53 [0.08, 0.97]	.021
Postgame (.92)	3.17 (1.21)	4.34 (0.78)	5.18***	1.16 [0.71, 1.60]	.001
t _within	4.36***	−1.70
d _av [LL, UL]	0.66 [0.36, 0.96]	−0.26 [−0.57, 0.05]
p	.001	.097
State self-esteem
Pregame	4.28 (1.32)	5.10 (1.22)	2.91**	0.65 [0.21, 1.10]	.005
Postgame	3.60 (1.41)	4.98 (1.46)	4.29***	0.96 [0.51, 1.40]	.001
t _within	3.74***	0.58
d _av [LL, UL]	0.49 [0.23, 0.76]	0.09 [−0.25, 0.43]
p	.001	.565

Note. t_between = the difference between losers and winners; t_within = the difference within losers or winners; UL = upper limit; LL = lower limit.

*p < .05. **p < .05. ***p < .05.

Results

As observed in Table 2, the participants who won their game did not differ in age or years of tennis playing experience from those who lost. However, the winners evaluated their level of playing as much higher.

Cognitive Measures

The measures of the agentic versus communal categories use in perceptions of similarities were subjected to a 2 (outcome) × 2 (time of measurement) analysis of variance with repeated measurements on the latter factor. This analysis revealed an interaction of the two factors as a sole significant effect, F(1, 78) = 5.21, p = .025, $η_{p}^{2}$ = .063. Winners and losers did not differ in the pregame measurement (d _s = −0.01), but this difference emerged in the postgame measurement (d _s = 0.52) due to the increased use of agentic categories (and the decreased use of communal ones) among the winners after the game (d _av = 0.36). As observed in Table 2, all four means had a negative sign, indicating a general preference for communal over agentic categories; this in line with the aforementioned dominance of communal categories in person perception (Abele & Wojciszke, 2014). However, this preference for communal categories disappeared in one condition: Among the winners after the game, the mean was M = −0.10 and did not differ significantly from zero, t(39) = .99, ns, one-sample test. The influence of success on the propensity for agentic categories was weaker than in Study 1, where the winners showed a clear preference for agentic over communal categories. In the present study, the winners showed only a disappearance of the opposing tendency to use communal categories. A possible explanation for this difference is that the table tennis game (Study 2) was less involving or subjectively important than the ground tennis game (Study 1).

We also analyzed the subjective ability to act and to experience as a function of the outcome. As shown in the middle panel of Table 2, the winners showed significantly higher belief in their ability to act than losers, and this difference was moderate (d _s = 0.52). A similar tendency emerged for the belief in one’s own ability to experience (d _s = 0.42), although it was only marginally significant, p = .067.

Affective Measures

The measures of mood were subjected to a 2 (outcome: success–failure) × 2 (time of measurement: before–after) analysis of variance with repeated measures on the latter factor. This analysis yielded a main effect of outcome, F(1, 78) = 20.37, p < .001, $η_{p}^{2}$ = .207, and an interaction between the outcome and the measurement time, F(1, 78) = 20.72, p < .001, η² = .210. As observed in Table 2, mood was higher among the winners than the losers already at the pregame measurement (d _s = .53), and this difference increased in the postgame measurement (d _s = 1.16). Among the winners, we observed only a slight increase in mood (d _av = −0.26), which was marginally significant, p = .097; among the losers, we found a large (d _av = 0.66) decrease in mood. A similar analysis of variance on self-esteem revealed similar effects, including a main effect of outcome, F(1, 78) = 16.81, p < .001, η² = .177, and a marginal interaction between the outcome and the measurement time, F(1, 78) = 3.83, p = .054, η² = .047. As observed in Table 2, self-esteem was higher among the winners than the losers already at the pregame measurement (d _s = 0.65), and this difference increased in the postgame measurement (d _s = 0.96). Whereas we observed no increase in self-esteem among the winners, we found a moderate (d _av = 0.49) decrease in self-esteem among the losers. Figure 2 illustrates differences between the interactions involving agentic content use and self-esteem: Whereas for the former, there were no pregame differences between losers and winners, for the latter, such differences were seen already at the pregame measurement and increased in the postgame measurement.

Figure 2.

Interaction of the outcome with the time of measurement for the agentic content use and state self-esteem (Study 2).

To summarize the findings, winners seem to be affectively disposed to a success, as they show higher mood and self-esteem already (immediately) before the game. Understandably, experiences of success or failure further increase these differences. However, the differences in cognition (increased use of agentic categories in perception of similarities and increased perceptions of own ability to act) emerge only after a successful outcome. This is in line with our hypothesis that success leads to agentic cognition. We also found that the affective consequences of failing are stronger than the consequences of succeeding, consistent with the prospect theory (Kahneman & Tversky, 1979) and well-documented findings of stronger responses to losses than to gains (e.g., Boyce, Wood, Banks, Clark, & Brown, 2013).

Mini Meta-Analysis

We followed the practice of performing a mini meta-analysis of reported studies to assess the overall effect size (Goh, Hall, & Rosenthal, 2016; Lakens & Etz, 2017; McShane & Böckenholt, 2017). The overall effect size for the influence of success versus failure on the agentic content use (Study 1 and postgame measurement in Study 2) was d = 1.03, 95% CI [.70, 1.37], p < .001, the effect for positive mood was d = 1.21, 95% CI [.87, 1.55], p < .001, and the effect for self-esteem was d = 1.08, 95% CI [.75, 1.42], p < .001 (Schulze, 2004, using OpenMEE software, fixed effect model). Note that this effect size is considered large (Cohen, 1988). For effects of the game outcome on mood positivity, Q(1) = 0.13, p = .72, and on self-esteem, Q(1) = 0.67, p = .41, there was no evidence for heterogeneity across the studies, but in the case of agentic content usage, there is a significant heterogeneity Q(1) = 12.04, p = .001. We have no clear explanation for this heterogeneity, although such results are likely to be observed when a set of studies is performed on the same hypothesis (Lakens & Etz, 2017). Typically, such heterogeneity suggests some moderators (e.g., subjective importance of the outcome) which should be addressed in future research.

General Discussion

Our studies produce both replications and entirely new findings. The replications concern the affective consequences of outcomes: Whereas failure strongly decreases both mood and self-esteem, experiencing a success tends to slightly increase both of these variables. The novelty concerns the important cognitive consequences of outcomes: Success increases agentic thinking in terms of the construal of a current situation. However, the present studies did not show the expected increases in communal thinking after failure. There are two possible reasons for this lack of effect. The first is the efficiency of defenses against failure and the resulting difficulty in inducing the recipient perspective via failure information. Whereas positive information about the self is readily accepted as valid, negative information about the self is deeply scrutinized and ultimately dismissed as invalid or inapplicable (Bradley, 1978; Ditto & Lopez, 1992; Lord, Ross, & Lepper, 1979). Emotional consequences of such negative information seem intrusive and inevitable (Miketta & Friese, 2017), but its cognitive consequences (i.e., the recipient-like way of thinking) may be prevented by efficient psychological defenses after failure. The second reason for the lack of increased communal thinking after the failure experience may be that this hypothesis is simply wrong. It remains for further studies to decide whether the failure–communion link postulated here should be entirely dropped or whether it is moderated by some other variables.

Whereas the agentic interpretation of an action is based on its efficiency, communal interpretation is based on the goal content. This focus on different features of behavior gives agentic and communal interpretations a clear semantic independence. It also results in an interesting sort of ambiguity: An identical action may be construed in either agentic or communal terms (Wojciszke, 1994). For example, a botched attempt to help a friend may be seen as a failure in agentic terms but as virtuous helpfulness in communal terms. If the present theorizing is right, it can be expected that successful persons can see many more successes and failures (and less virtue or malevolence) than unsuccessful ones.

Footnotes

Acknowledgments

We thank Michal Trzebowski and Maja Krzewicka for their help in data gathering.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was supported by a Polish National Centre for Science Grant (NCN 2012/04/A/HS6/00581).

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