Self-worth theory suggests that teachers and students often operate at crosspurposes: Teachers encourage achievement through effort, yet many students attempt to avoid the implication that they lack ability by not trying. To test these assertions undergraduates rated their affective reactions to hypothetical test failures under conditions of high or low effort and in the presence or absence of self-serving excuses. Then, in the role of teachers, they administered punishment to hypothetical students under the same failure conditions. Results indicated that inability attributions and negative affect were greatest when failure followed much effort. Conversely, failure reflected less on ability, and shame was correspondingly reduced when students studied little-the same failure condition that subjects, in the role of teachers, punished most severely.

ments. In this new schema nAch is assigned a subordinate status as one of many antecedents to achievement, with cognitive attributions becoming the major causal determinants of achievement behavior.Following Heider (19S8), Weiner proposes ability, effort, luck, and task difficulty as among the major perceived causes of achievement performance (Weiner, 1972(Weiner, , 1979. There is general consensus that high and low nAch individuals harbor differential explanations about the causes of their successes and failures (Weiner et al., 1971;Weiner, Heckhausen, Meyer, & Cook, 1972;Weiner & Kukla, 1970;Weiner & Potepan, 1970), and it is precisely these differences that are taken as the essence of individual differences in achievement motivation. 'Generally speaking, persons motivated to approach success (high nAch) attribute failure to lack of effort and success to their ability, whereas failure-avoiding (low nAch) persons tend to ascribe failure to lack of ability and success to external factors such as luck. The

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for their helpful comments and suggestions on an earlier draft of this article.Requests for reprints should be sent to M. V. Covington,

In the preceding article, Brown and Weiner identified several presumed controversies concerning the affective consequences of effort and ability ascriptions in success and failure. In this rejoinder, we attempt to resolve areas of apparent conflict and to offer a broad synthesis around the self-worth theory of achievement motivation. Attribution and self-worth theories focus on different yet compatible aspects of achievement affect. The former theory focuses on the moral-like (guilt) consequences of not trying, and the latter attends to ability-mediated affect (shame and humiliation). It is demonstrated that although effort expenditure reduces feelings of guilt, it also triggers incompetency-linked affect via ability demotion. Thus for students, effort becomes a double-edged sword: Although high effort may reduce the negative affect association with noncompliance to a work ethic, it also implies that the cause of failure is low ability, a realization that leads to shame and humiliation. This dynamic underscores the need for students to establish and balance an image of competency and diligence as competing sources of approval and worth. Different aspects of this coping process are accentuated depending on which role-playing methodology is used. When subjects infer ability from the circumstances of failure, the defensive aspects of effort manipulation are illuminated. When ability level is assumed by subjects, either high or low, the role of effort as a moral component of worth is emphasized.