Abstract

Expectations regarding future academic achievement are particularly vulnerable to violations due to their often overly optimistic nature. Therefore, students frequently have to cope with expectation violations. The present study examines how three situational aspects—controllability of expectation (dis-)confirmation, degree of expectation violation, and likelihood of future expectation checks—as well as dispositional Need for Cognitive Closure (NCC) predict coping with expectation violations in the educational context, namely assimilation (i.e., striving for confirmation), accommodation (i.e., expectation change), and immunisation (i.e., ignoring discrepant information). Each situational predictor was expected to be particularly associated with one of the three coping strategies. High controllability was anticipated to facilitate assimilation following unexpected negative feedback, whereas a substantial discrepancy in expectation violation was presumed to encourage accommodation. Additionally, a low likelihood of future expectation checks was predicted to promote immunisation. It was further hypothesised that high NCC would reinforce these tendencies. A vignette experiment was conducted with n = 248 participants. T-tests and MANCOVA confirmed the expected effect of the situational variables on the respective coping strategies. In addition, the association between assimilation and accommodation with these coping strategies was enhanced in individuals with high NCC, suggesting an interaction effect between personality and context in the use of coping strategies. However, NCC did not moderate the association between the risk of future expectation checks and immunisation. Nonetheless, this study provides new insights into the interplay of situational and dispositional predictors of coping with expectation violations.

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