Two groups of college students were given a measure of test anxiety along with an elementary coding task. One group was told that this coding task was an intelligence test, the other that it was just an experimental task of interest to E. A measure was also taken of whether S believed or did not believe the instructions he was given. The results showed that those Ss who are given intelligence-test instructions perform better than Ss given the experimental-task instructions. Within the group of Ss given the intelligence-test instructions, those Ss who believed the instructions performed substantially better than those Ss who did not believe.
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