In 2023, less than one in five in Iran who saw good opportunities for starting a business in the country were deterred by a fear of failure. This was the lowest of the 48 countries where this survey was conducted. South Korea followed in second with 27 percent fearing to fail, with Switzerland in third. On the other hand, nearly two thirds of potential entrepreneurs in China were deterred by fear of failure, a concern that also was high in South Africa, India, and Saudi Arabia.

Among 15-year-olds, boys tend to report higher life satisfaction than girls. Recent research has shown that this gender gap tends to be larger in more gender-egalitarian countries. We shed light on this apparent paradox by examining the mediating role of two psychological dispositions: competitiveness and fear of failure. Using data from the 2018 PISA study, we analyze the life satisfaction, competitiveness, and fear of failure of more than 400,000 15-year-old boys and girls in 63 countries with known levels of gender equality. We find that competitiveness and fear of failure together mediate more than 40 percent of the effects on life satisfaction of gender and its interaction with gender equality. Thus, interventions targeting competitiveness and fear of failure could potentially have an impact on the gender gap in life satisfaction among adolescents in gender equal countries.

The dataset comprises individual-level responses collected through a structured survey instrument administered between August and December 2024. The data encompass four core constructs: Disorganization (DIS), Fear of Failure (FOF), Academic Procrastination (APC), and Academic Performance (APR), each measured through multiple Likert-scale items on a 5-point scale (1 = strongly disagree; 5 = strongly agree).

The dataset includes responses from 2,111 higher education students spanning diploma, bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral programs across East and Central Java. Each row in the dataset represents a single respondent, and each column corresponds to a specific survey item derived from previously validated psychometric instruments.

The structure of the dataset is as follows: DIS1–DIS5: Indicators measuring students’ disorganized academic behavior, such as difficulty structuring study time and planning tasks. FOF1–FOF5: Indicators reflecting fear-based emotional responses to failure, including anxiety about evaluation and concern for others’ perceptions. APC1–APC5: Indicators capturing behavioral tendencies toward academic procrastination. APR1–APR4: Indicators of perceived academic competence and performance.

The data have been cleaned and prepared for advanced statistical analysis, including mediation and moderation modeling using Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) techniques. This dataset is instrumental for understanding cognitive-behavioral mechanisms in higher education, particularly in the context of developing countries like Indonesia, and aligns with the broader agenda of educational quality improvement and student success.