Handicapping: Positive Self-Evaluation

INTRODUCTION
Students are always experiencing threats elicited by fear they have on their minds, such as failing a major examination or beating the project 's deadline. Students often do such thing like cramming and do other reasons for them not to do their responsibilities on time. They are afraid to fail but they are lethargic to start their academic works. In other words, they intentionally hinder their performance. There are students who strive hard to avoid being identified as “stupid” by others. There are people struggle to maintain positive self-evaluation yet, the individuals might employ self-handicapping strategy to secure the positive self-evaluation while facing the occurrence with little chance to succeed (Cheng & Law, 2015).
A statement came from Wusik and Axsom (2016) states that self-handicapping are conceptually different in excuse-making; it is also different than intentional failure. When future success is uncertain, self-handicapping can be used as a strategic measure taken to protect an individual 's insecure positive reputation. Those who self-handicap want to protect themselves against possible failure, while the differences between those who fail intentionally disregard the probability of success. It is an irony that those who self-handicap don 't want to fail but the fact that they are using this coping mechanism actually increase the chances of failure.
Gerrig and Zimbardo (2012) described self-handicapping as a process in which individual develop