ORIGINAL PAPER Achievement Goals in Social Interactions: Learning with Mastery vs. Performance Goals

Abstract Little work has studied achievement goals in so-cial interaction situations. The present experiment aimed at contributing to this matter by showing the potential of so-cial interaction (in particular disagreement) to moderate the effects of achievement goals on learning. Participants were led to think they interacted with a partner, sharing opinions about a text that they were studying. Mastery and perfor-mance goals were manipulated. During the “interaction,” they received either disagreement or agreement from this bogus partner. Results showed that a condition in which mastery goals were induced led to better learning than a per-formance goal condition only when the partner disagreed. No differences between goal conditions were observed when the Part of this work was conducted during Céline Darnon’s doctoral dissertation under the supervision of Fabrizio Butera, and was written during Céline Darnon’s post-doctorate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA, thanks to a Fulbright fellowship