Standards, Persuasion, and Performance

An experiment was performed to examine the influence of goal setting and verbal persuasion on task goals, expectancies, and performance. Subjects were assigned an easy, medium, or hard performance standard on a creativity task over 10 repeated trials. In addition, they either did or did not receive verbal persuasion throughout the work period. Task goals and expectancies were measured prior to each trial. As hypothesized from cognitive mediation theory (Garland, 1985), assigned standards and verbal persuasion influenced task goals and expectancies, which in turn influenced performance.