Psychologists have studied this sort of behavior since at least 1978, when Steven Berglas and Edward E. Jones used the phrase “self-handicapping” to describe students in a study who chose to take a drug that they were told would inhibit their performance on an exam (the drug was actually inert).

The urge goes well beyond a mere lowering of expectations, and it has more to do with protecting self-image than with psychological conflicts rooted in early development, in the Freudian sense. Recent research has helped clarify not just who is prone to self-handicapping but also its consequences  and its possible benefits.

In the original conception, Dr. Berglas and Dr. Jones identified self-handicapping in students who were told they had aced a test made up of impossible-to-answer questions. They had “succeeded” without knowing how or why. “These are the people who are told they are brilliant, without knowing how that inference is derived,” said Dr. Berglas, now an executive coach in the Los Angeles area. He understood the impulse, he said; he himself first experimented with drugs in high school just before taking the SAT, on which he was expected to get a perfect score  a reckless stunt that provided the seed for the theory.

The urge to shoot one’s own foot seems to be stronger in men than in women. In surveys, Dr. Hirt and others have measured the tendency by asking people to rate how well a series of 25 statements describes their own behavior  for example, “I try not to get too intensely involved in competitive activities so it won’t hurt too much if I lose or do poorly.” Men tend to score higher on these measures and, in lab studies, to handicap themselves more severely.

Image Credit... Jennifer Daniels

Yet given the opportunity, and a good reason, most people will claim some handicap. In a paper published last summer, Sean McCrea, a psychologist at the University of Konstanz in Germany, described experiments in which he manipulated participants’ scores on a variety of intelligence tests. In some, the subjects could choose to prepare before taking the test or could join the “no practice” group.