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.