Post 6: Sheldon's competence: Internal, uncontrollable, and stable

    The Attribution Theory aims to explain people’s reasons of motivations and emotional outcomes. Depending on the outcomes being positive or negative, certain types of accompanying emotions arise as a result of life events. That is, if the life event is related to happiness, the following emotions could be pride, gratitude, hope, which were positive in nature. In contrast, if the life event has sadness and frustration in it, the emotional outcomes could be in the spectrum of anger, pity, guilt, and shame, which are regarded as negative. 
    

    Weiner’s attribution theory categorizes the reasons whether they are external or internal (locus of control), controllable or uncontrollable, and stable or unstable. Although the theory is somewhat outdated today in capturing more mixed emotions, it is still powerful in explaining basic human behavior and considered as seminal in the psychological research. Depending on contextual factors, the attributions can vary in between of these components. 

    Although it is fair to categorize Sheldon’s motivation and emotion into certain type of descriptive attributions, he seems to follow similar patterns in his life circumstances. If we were to look at his beliefs on his perceived-competence, it is stable, internal, and uncontrollable. 

It is stable because Sheldon has this belief that his competence is given to him and it is an innate talent that he has. Thus, it is not controllable and comes from inside. Accordingly, his perceived-competence is internal. This is a bit interesting in a sense that when most people think that they are talented and smart, they might tend to believe that they do not have to put so much effort in achieving tasks because it is within them rather than developing entity. But even though Sheldon seems to be firmly believing that his skills are inborn, God-given just like his mother believes, he spends most of his time in doing physics. evidently, starting from his childhood. His career choice is also aligned with his so-called "given" skills. Because he loves physics and his one of the biggest desires is to be the best physicist in the planet, he hold strong and intense emotions toward success and failures outcomes related to physics.

If he successfully completes a task about physics, he has so much pride. On the contrary, when he experiences a failure (recalling the competition that he lost) he has anger and shame. This is due to the firm belief that his competence was given, and the failure outcome almost does not make sense considering his high competence. More specially, because Sheldon attributes this negative outcome to an internal and uncontrollable cause. Consequently, he always tries to protect his identity with pride along with his high achievements in his career. His huge ego cannot take any failure for that matter and thus organically reveals the emotional side of Sheldon: Angry and more angry! We shall see if Sheldon would be able to change his fixed mindset on his perceived-competence and find a way to mitigate his emotional reactions in more productive directions.

Post 5: Sheldon's Fear of Failure

    Goal complexes could be explained through multiple approaches. One of the most common approach is the hope for success and the fear of failure. That is, people tend to hope that they will always succeed their determined tasks. Accordingly, they either work harder to reach their success goals or sometimes lower benchmarks to keep their perception on their success stable. People who work harder and believe in themselves fall in the scale of optimistic and overstrivers. Optimistic have higher confidence in their competence and are positive toward achieving more cognitively demanding tasks. Overstrivers fear from failure and put excessive effort to keep their confidence balanced with their perception of success. On the other hand, people who lower their benchmarks or even deciding not to set any tasks for themselves due to the fear of failure fall into the spectrum of failure avoiding or failure accepting. Failure avoiding behavior encompasses fear and low self-competence that lead people to lower the expectations for themselves. Failure accepting people tend to not try and usually are with a lower confidence.

    When looking at Sheldon Cooper, his primary goal was to be successful in physics: his beloved discipline. He always expected to do well and never endure any failure. In one of the episodes, Sheldon and his wife Amy came up with a discovery and started to develop ideas to publish a paper on the Asymmetry Theory. They both believed that this discovery was outstanding and could change the direction in physics significantly. Sheldon and Amy put lots of effort and energy to develop and conceptualize this theory and even stay up late to complete the work. Those behaviors showed that Sheldon and Amy were intrinsically motivated and set their goal toward accomplishing this task. Sheldon was already confident that this was a genius idea and was proud that he was the one who came up with it. 

    Yet, Sheldon’s best friends, Leonard and Howard, found out that some Russian physicist were already published a paper in Russian, where they discovered the Asymmetry Theory. Leonard were too hesitant to share the devastating news with Sheldon as they anticipated how Sheldon would react to that after all investments on the idea. And the conclusion was exactly how Leonard was expected: Sheldon was shocked and upset that somebody else explored the theory long before than him. Sheldon was apparently too much set to achieve his goal and this circumstance devastated him for a while. 

    This scene could be evidence that he was an overstriver almost all the time and what happened to him was unacceptable in his system of thinking. Interestingly though Sheldon as acting overstriver revealed how much Sheldon afraid of losing in life especially when it comes to physics. Sheldon’s one of the fears could be about his decreasing confidence as he strongly connected his physics confidence to his outstanding accomplishments. He might have taken this failure as a de-validation of his competence. Because he values looking competent all the time in physics, this incident seemed to be impacted his emotions strongly.

    This vignette demonstrates how emotional he could become when he encounter a failure in physics despite the fact that this was not connected to his competence. His fear of failure manifested itself when he screamed and smashed his white board. Sheldon acted as a fixed mindset person considering some of the failures in his job as commensurable to his actual competence. Sheldon often times forgot the fact that even great minds can make mistakes. The important thing is to orient ourselves to learn from our mistakes.

Post 4: Sheldon and the Value of Physics

Values play an important role in motivation. One’s motivation can be explained number of personal reasons that is structured internally or externally. In fact, understanding the values are a bit difficult to capture without asking certain questions to the protagonist.

Considering Sheldon Cooper’s motivation to study physics and to become a great one can be explained his value of competence. Reflecting back, desire for autonomy, competence, and relatedness emerge organically in one’s actions. Even though it is a bit challenging to examine one’s value structures, some of the elements altogether might give some idea regarding how Sheldon valued physics and related activities. 

Values can stem from various aspects. First, Sheldon’s values for doing physics is about proving his competence, which Atkinson explain this as achievement motivation. He is always arrogant and humiliating when it comes to demonstrating his competence in general but also particularly at physics. He has this huge desire for achievement. Next, Sheldon also values physics starting from his childhood. Even though it might be difficult to make sense of how Sheldon had began valuing physics, his interest might have been an explanation for his value. If Sheldon would have valued physics just for getting good grade, he would not be able to become a physicist when grade lost its meaning. That is, becoming a physicist neither involves a high-pay nor appraisal from faculty as there are numerous people in his department who are also successful. So, external rewards were not part of his motivation and values for studying physics.

From this perspective, Sheldon seems to be valuing physics itself as a discipline rather than its perks although reputation might be also part of his expectations. These desires seem to be intertwined and impossible to separate for analytical purposes. Competence and enjoyment along with appraisals might be all part of Sheldon’s value structures to become a physicist. 

Sheldon has never ending enjoyment and interest toward physics itself, which has almost never been influenced by external factors. Even failures! Once, Sheldon attended in a physics bowl (a physics competition) against his three colleagues within the same university, Caltech. He lost this competition since he could not give an answer to the final question. Yet, this failure did not push Sheldon away from doing more physics. In contrast, he became even more persistent to do better in his work. He is stubborn when it comes to becoming highly competent in physics. Sheldon gives the impression that he created all the physics and nobody else can understand as much as Sheldon can. This piece demonstrates his academic confidence as a physicist and his ownership on physics knowledge. Seeing how nothing can discourage Sheldon to be a physicist might be evidence that his values are intrinsic and independent from other people’s success or discouragements. In fact, his values help Sheldon to always stay motivated for working harder in spite of challenges.