Achievement motive versus fear of failure
Also known as: Hope of success vs fear of failure, Fear of failure
Achievement behavior reflects a tug-of-war between the hope of succeeding and the fear of failing.
What it means
Atkinson's achievement motivation model treats achievement behavior as resolving a conflict between two dispositions: the motive to approach success (hope of success) and the motive to avoid failure (fear of failure). The resulting tendency depends on each motive's strength multiplied by the perceived probability of success and its incentive value, where harder tasks promise more pride but threaten more shame. A key prediction is that people dominated by hope of success prefer intermediate-difficulty tasks, where the outcome is most diagnostic of ability, whereas people dominated by fear of failure avoid that informative middle, gravitating to very easy tasks (guaranteed success) or very hard ones (failure carries no stigma). The nuance is that the two motives are partly independent rather than opposite poles, so a person can be high or low on both. It matters as a rigorous formal model linking personality, task choice, and risk-taking, and a precursor to modern approach-avoidance frameworks.
How the arithmetic works
The products generate the predictions. The tendency to approach success is motive strength times the probability of success times the incentive value of success, where incentive value is defined as one minus that probability. Multiply it out and the approach tendency peaks at a probability of one half. The avoidance tendency has the identical shape with the sign reversed, so it peaks there too, hollowing out exactly the point that draws the success-seeker. Resultant motivation reduces to one difference, hope minus fear, scaling a single bell-shaped curve: flip that sign and preference flips from the middle to both extremes at once. An awkward corollary follows honestly from the math — someone dominated by fear should attempt nothing at all, which Atkinson patched by adding extrinsic motivation to the equation.
What the evidence shows
The canonical test is Atkinson and Litwin's 1960 ring toss. Participants chose their own throwing distance, and those high in achievement imagery and low in test anxiety stood at intermediate distances more often, persisted longer, and stayed later at a final exam. The pattern replicates unevenly. It surfaces most reliably when the experimenter measures each person's subjective probability of success rather than assuming an objectively middling task feels like a coin flip, and it depends on sorting people by a difference between two noisy instruments. Spangler's 1992 meta-analysis puts the average correlation between picture-story achievement motivation and real outcomes near .19 to .22 — genuine but modest, drawn from a literature predating preregistration, much of it running on samples of a few dozen.
The rival explanation
Trope offered a different reason for the same choices. People pick intermediate tasks, he argued, because those tasks are the most diagnostic — the outcome tells you the most about your ability — not because they maximize anticipated pride or dread. Difficulty and diagnosticity are normally confounded, since the middling task is usually the informative one — which is why the intermediate task gets loosely described as the diagnostic one, as though Atkinson had said so. He had not; the diagnosticity was a by-product of where the curve peaked. So Atkinson's data fit both accounts equally well. Unconfound them experimentally and diagnosticity survives on its own: tasks high in diagnosticity are preferred over low-diagnostic tasks of equal difficulty. The reframing has teeth. If the middle is avoided because it hurts, you manage the feeling; if because it reveals, you manage the information.
Using it in practice
The usable signal is the shape of someone's choices, not their stated ambition: the missing middle, the moderately hard thing nobody volunteers for. Exhortation does not fill that gap, because the middle is aversive precisely for being informative about the person. Lowering the cost of a middling attempt does — private drafts, reversible bets, feedback framed as calibration rather than verdict. Treat labels cautiously, though. Implicit and explicit measures of the motive barely converge, meta-analyzed near .14, and Conroy's Performance Failure Appraisal Inventory splits fear of failure into five distinct appraisals, from shame to upsetting important others. Elliot and Church add that the fear is not simply bad: it feeds performance-approach goals, which improve graded performance, alongside performance-avoidance goals, which damage grades and interest alike.
Examples
A student high in fear of failure picks either a trivially easy paper topic or an impossibly ambitious one, dodging the moderately challenging choice where a poor grade would reveal her true ability.
A club tennis player afraid of losing enters either the beginners' ladder he cannot lose or the open draw where losing to a seed means nothing, skipping the league that would actually measure him.
An engineer hoping to succeed volunteers for the project the team gives even odds, where pulling it off would say something about him. The colleague dreading failure takes the routine maintenance ticket.
A sales rep dreading a missed number sandbags his forecast to a figure he cannot miss, or quotes a whale account nobody expects to close, skipping the winnable mid-market deals.
A candidate takes the take-home exercise but declines the live pair-programming session pitched at identical difficulty — the dread is the same either way; what differs is that only the live hour would settle whether he can actually think on his feet.
First described in John Atkinson (1957, 1964).
Key references
- Köllner, M. G., & Schultheiss, O. C. (2014). Meta-analytic evidence of low convergence between implicit and explicit measures of the needs for achievement, affiliation, and power. Frontiers in Psychology, 5, 826. doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00826
- Conroy, D. E., Willow, J. P., & Metzler, J. N. (2002). Multidimensional fear of failure measurement: The Performance Failure Appraisal Inventory. Journal of Applied Sport Psychology, 14(2), 76-90. doi.org/10.1080/10413200252907752
- Elliot, A. J., & Church, M. A. (1997). A hierarchical model of approach and avoidance achievement motivation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 72(1), 218-232. doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.72.1.218
- Spangler, W. D. (1992). Validity of questionnaire and TAT measures of need for achievement: Two meta-analyses. Psychological Bulletin, 112(1), 140-154. doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.112.1.140
- Trope, Y. (1975). Seeking information about one's ability as a determinant of choice among tasks. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 32(6), 1004-1013. doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.32.6.1004
- Atkinson, J. W. (1957). Motivational determinants of risk-taking behavior. Psychological Review, 64(6), 359-372. doi.org/10.1037/h0043445
- Atkinson, J. W., & Litwin, G. H. (1960). Achievement motive and test anxiety conceived as motive to approach success and motive to avoid failure. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 60(1), 52-63. doi.org/10.1037/h0041119