Beyond prevention: Regulating responses to self-regulation failure to avoid a set-back effect

Abstract

Despite having good intentions, people fail at times to self-regulate. Most of these instances of everyday self-regulation failure are in themselves trivial. However, the ensuing chain of attributions, thoughts, and subsequent behaviors that people experience after an instance of failure may be detrimental to their long-term self-regulation success. In two studies, we examined the potential of intervening in the aftermath of failure to prevent this so-called “setback effect” by instructing people that setbacks may occur and to attribute future incidents of failure to external causes. In Study 1, we tested whether the intervention indeed decreased the frequency of self-regulation failure in the context of dieting and procrastination. In Study 2, we aimed to replicate the findings from Study 1 in the context of procrastination, and we explored the mediating role of self-efficacy. In both studies, participants in the intervention condition experienced less self-regulation failure and more subjective self-regulation success in the days after the intervention. Study 2 demonstrated that this effect was partly mediated by an increase in self-efficacy. Taken together, findings suggest that a simple mindset manipulation promoting external attributions to failure may be effective in preventing a setback effect from occurring by protecting self-efficacy.