Fear of Success

Competitiveness among females and males in physical activity classes

“…Horner (1968) proposed a "fear-of-success" construct, described as fear of the negative consequences of achievement, particularly social rejection, to account for sex differences in achievement motivation. Subsequent research (e.g., Condry & Dyer, 1976;Tresemer, 1977) raised doubts about Horner's construct and measure, but research has continued to document sex differences in achievement motivation and behaviors.…”

Who Doesn't Want to be Envied? Personality Correlates of Emotional Responses to Outperformance Scenarios

“…Yet as shown by these studies, as well as earlier work on fear of success (e.g., Tresemer, 1977), the extended Self-Evaluation Maintenance Model (e.g., Beach et al, 1998), and STTUC (Exline & Lobel, 1999;Zell & Exline, 2009), achievements can prompt discomfort when they involve outperforming others. Along these lines, this project had two aims.…”

“…Thus, we reasoned that high-sociotropy persons would be especially sensitive to situations involving a threat of interpersonal disharmony, conflict, or separation from others. Prior work has shown that outshining others can create these types of interpersonal stressors (for reviews, see Exline & Lobel, 1999;Parrott & Rodriquez Mosquera, 2008;Tresemer, 1977). Third, sociotropy's role as a vulnerability factor for depression is also relevant.…”

“…Early studies of fear of success (e.g., Horner, 1968;Tresemer, 1977) focused largely on women. More recently, studies showing modesty by outperformers have found effects mainly among female participants (e.g., Heatherington, Burns, & Gustafson, 1998;Heatherington et al, 1993).…”

“…Early research on the fear of success construct (see Tresemer, 1977, for a review) demonstrated that people often had ambivalent feelings about success in general, and perhaps especially about publicly outperforming others (e.g., Horner, 1968). More recently, Beach and colleagues (Beach et al, 1998;Beach et al, 1996), building on Tesser's (1988) Self-Evaluation Maintenance model, found that people often experienced negative emotion after outperforming a close relationship partner in a domain relevant to the partner.…”