Motivation and Emotion Exam 2

Goal-Performance Discrepancy

- Generally speaking, people with goals outperform those without goals (Locke, 1996; Locke & Latham, 1990, 2002). And generally speaking, the same person performs better when she has a goal than when she does not have a goal. So people who create goals for themselves and people who accept the goals others set for them perform better than those who do not create or accept such goals. The finding that goals enhance performance is what makes the goal concept an appealing and practical motivational construct.

Achievement for the Future

"Future achievement orientation" refers to an individual's psychological distance from a long-term achievement goal (e.g., winning the state championship). The importance of future achievement orientation is that, other things being equal, any achievement goal per- ceived far away in time receives less approach-versus-avoidance weight than does a goal in the very near future. That means future goals generate less approach than do imme- diate goals. However, future achievement strivings can add to present-day achievement motivation by adding additional future motivation to present motivation (e.g., motivation for today + motivation for next week + motivation for next month + motivation for next year + motivation for one's career; Raynor, 1981).

Acquired Needs

All of us need autonomy, competence, and relatedness, because these are universal human needs. In contrast, implicit needs have a social (rather than an innate) origin. Social needs originate from preferences gained through experience and socialization. These needs develop within us as acquired individual differences—as an acquired or a learned part of our personality.

Empowering People: Mastery Modeling Program

A formal program to empower people through self-efficacy training is to employ a mastery modeling program. In a mastery modeling program an expert in the skill area works with a group of relative novices to show them how to cope with an otherwise fearsome situa- tion. In the example above, professionals empowered women through self-defense skills. In the school, teachers might use a mastery modeling program to empower children dur- ing reading, computers, or public speaking. On the athletic field, coaches might empower athletes with defensive skills and resilient confidence to cope with whatever offense next week's opponent might try. In the hospital and workplace, therapists and managers might empower lonely clients and anxious salespeople with social skills and resilient confidence when interacting with colleagues, clients, and strangers.

Cognition

A good deal of cognitive interpretation takes place between the actual, objective environ- mental contingencies that exist in the world and a person's subjective understanding of per- sonal control in such environments. Mental events distort the relationship between objective contingencies and subjective control, and these events therefore create some margin of error between objective truth and subjective understanding. Three cognitive elements are particularly important: biases (e.g., the "illusion of control"); attributions (explanations of why we think we do or do not have control); and expectancies, which are the subjective personal control beliefs we carry over from past experiences into our current situation. To illustrate the importance of cognition, ask two people who experience the same environmental contingency why they avoided a traffic ticket, avoided the flu, got a job, and so on. People's outcome beliefs (and hence their replies to your question) stem not only from the objective information about the world (i.e., contingency) but also from each person's unique biases, attributions, and expectancies. Hence, to understand learned helplessness, we need to pay attention not only to objective environmental contingencies (how controllable outcomes really are) but also to subjective personal control beliefs (how controllable the person thinks those outcomes are).

FOUR MINDSETS

A mindset is a cognitive framework to guide one's attention, information processing, decision making, and thinking about the meaning of effort, success, failure, and one's own personal qualities. Once adopted, a mindset functions as a cognitive motivational system that produces many important downstream consequences in one's thinking, feeling, and acting. That is, the person with one mindset looks at a motivational episode in a fundamentally different way than does the person with a different mindset, and these different ways of thinking yield differences in lifestyle and ways of coping. The present chapter will describe and explain the motivational significance of four mindsets, as introduced in Table 9.1. Each mindset listed in Table 9.1 provides a pair of contrasting motivational systems that exist simultaneously within each individual. The motivational systems coexist, but people tend toward one motivational system rather than the other. This tendency toward one moti- vational system or the other occurs sometimes as a result of chronic personality differences and other times occurs as a result of situation-specific circumstances.

Long-Term Goal Setting

A student who wants to become a teacher and an athlete who wants to win an Olympic event exemplify individuals involved in long-term goal setting. To accomplish a distant goal, the performer first has to attain several requisite short-term goals. Would-be doctors, for instance, first have to make a high GPA as undergraduates, get accepted into a medical school, raise or borrow a great deal of money, move to a different city, graduate from med- ical school, complete an internship, join a hospital or partnership, and so forth, all before they can begin their careers as doctors. Thus, goals can be short term or long term or a series of short-term goals linked together into one long-term goal. No significant difference in performance emerges among performers with short-term, long-term, or a mixture of short- and long-term goals, although all outperform people with no goals.

Pessimistic Explanatory Style

Academic failures, poor physical health, and subpar job performance are common. They happen to us all. Some of us react to such failures by increasing effort and by trying even harder than before. Others react by giving up. A pessimistic explanatory style predisposes people toward the latter response-giving up-in times of failure and setbacks. When a student with a pessimistic style faces such educational frustrations and fail- ures (e.g., disappointing grades, unintelligible lectures, confusing textbooks), she typically responds with a passive, fatalistic coping style that leads to decreased effort and deterio- rating grades (Peterson & Barrett, 1987). As to job performance, one vocation with more than its share of frustrations, failures, and rejections is selling life insurance because only a small percentage of potential clients ever buy a policy. One pair of researchers assessed life insurance agents' explanatory styles and recorded which agents performed well or poorly and which agents stayed on the job or quit (Seligman & Schulman, 1986). The attributionally pessimistic agents were more likely to quit, and those attributional pes- simists who continued to work performed significantly worse than did their more optimistic peers.

Developmental influences

Achievement-related emotions and motivations show a predictable developmental pattern. Children are not born with pride or shame; neither is an innate emotion. Instead, pride emerges from a developmental history of success episodes ending in mastery and task success; shame emerges from a developmental history of failure episodes ending in ridicule. Developmentally, we learn to be pride-prone or shame-prone when facing a standard of excellence.

Goal Congruence

All goals are not equal. Some goals are fully endorsed, feel personally authentic, and are whole-heartedly accepted, embraced, and owned by the self; other goals, however, are not at all self-endorsed, feel artificial or socially manufactured, and are taken on without a sense of personal ownership. Self-congruent goals are those that reflect the self's interests, needs, values, and preferences—they are goals that feel authentic and in harmony with the self; self-discrepant goals are those that neglect the self's interests, needs, values, and preferences and instead reflect only social obligations or external pressures — they are goals that feel artificial and conflict with the self (Sheldon & Elliot, 1998, 1999). A goal such as "become a doctor" for one person may by in harmony with the core self (e.g., you tell me to "become a doctor" and, yes, that is something I really want to do), but that same goal for another person might be in conflict with and have little fit with the self (e.g., you tell me to "become a doctor" but, no, that is not something I really want or value).

Goal Disengagement

An essential part of effective goal pursuit is knowing when to stop—knowing when to give up on one goal and switch over to an alternative goal. While the culture proclaims that "winners never quit and quitters never win," such a proclamation applies only to potentially attainable goals. Some goals are unattainable, or become unattainable because of a change in circumstances or personal resources, because the goal conflicts with another goal, or because the person simply has too many goals to pursue. For unattainable goals, we need to add the concept of goal disengagement to our analysis of goal setting and goal striving. Goal disengagement is the reduction of effort and goal commitment Reduction of effort means trying less hard or stopping goal-striving effort altogether; reduction of commitment means reducing the importance that is attached to the goal. Given this definition, it becomes apparent that goal disengagement is essentially the opposite of goal adoption or goal setting.

Ideal Self-Guides and Ought Self-Guides

An ideal self-guide is a goal (or standard or aspiration) of what one would like to become. Following an ideal self-guide leads the person to adopt a regulatory style oriented toward accomplishment and to a heightened sensitivity to move toward opportunities for positive outcomes. Eager approach behavior is both a natural and an enjoyable means to attain pos- itive outcomes, because the person strives to change, improve, and achieve something new. An ought self-guide is a goal (or standard or aspiration) specifying what one or others believe you should or must or have to do or be. Following an ought self-guide leads the person to adopt a regulatory style oriented toward responsibility and to a heightened sensi- tivity to losing what one already has. Cautious vigilance is both a natural and an enjoyable means to prevent negative outcomes, because the person strives to be true to his or her sense of duty, obligation, and responsibility.

Implementation Intentions

An implementation intention is an "if-then" plan that specifies in advance the goal-striving process. Formulating an implementation intention involves deciding in advance of one's goal striving the "when, where, and how" goal striving is to occur Admittedly, the term implementation intentions is a bit awkward, but it makes the distinction between two types of intentions—namely, a goal intention (setting a goal) and an implementation intention (striving to accomplish it).

MINDSET 1: DELIBERATIVE-IMPLEMENTAL

As emphasized in the previous chapter, one can distinguish between goal setting and goal striving (following Lewin, Dembo, Festinger, & Sears, 1944). This distinction draws atten- tion to a related distinction between motivation and volition (Kuhl, 1984, 1987). Moti- vation concerns the energization and initial direction of behavior, and it involves all the pre-decisional processes that energize and direct action (e.g., "What should I do tonight? There are so many things to do. Okay, I know what I want. I have decided I will read the textbook."). Volition, on the other hand, concerns the ongoing maintenance and persis- tence of motivated action, because it involves all the post-decisional processes that sustain ongoing action (e.g., "If I am going to read the textbook, then I must ignore all potential distractions—no television, no web surfing, no telephone chatting."). The two different mindsets—deliberative versus implemental—that underlie goal setting's "phase 1" flow into goal striving's "phase 2" are depicted graphically in Figure 9.1. In the study of the deliberative versus implemental mindset, the key distinction is between the initial selection of goals, which involves a great deal of deliberation, and the regulation of the action necessary to bring that chosen goal to fruition, which involves strategic execution and willpower. This distinction can be easily seen in a New Year's res- olution as the person first considers the pros and cons of many possible goals (e.g., "start exercising," "stop smoking," or "be nicer to my coworkers") to select and commit to one particular goal; yet, as the calendar turns to February, that chosen goal might not have been realized. Failed New Year resolutions (or any unrealized goal) make it clear that a distinction needs to be made between the deliberative process of setting a goal and the implementa- tion process of actually attaining it. Choosing and setting a goal involves and requires one mindset, while pursuing that goal involves and requires a different mindset.

Effort and Persistence

As people perform, self-efficacy beliefs influence how much effort they exert as well as how long they put forth that effort in the face of adversity (Bandura, 1989). Strong self-efficacy beliefs produce persistent coping efforts aimed at overcoming setbacks and difficulties (Salomon, 1984). Doubt, on the other hand, leads people to slacken their efforts when they encounter difficulties and perhaps give up altogether (Bandura & Cervone, 1983; Weinberg et al., 1979). Self-doubt also leads performers to settle prematurely on mediocre solutions. In trying to master complex activities, learning is always fraught with difficul- ties, obstacles, setbacks, frustrations, rejections, and inequalities, at least to a degree. Self-efficacy plays a pivotal role in facilitating effort and persistence, not because it silences doubt following failure and rejection (because these are expected, normal emotional reactions). Instead, self-efficacy leads to a quick recovery of self-assurance following such setbacks (Bandura, 1986). Using examples of persistent writers, scientists, and athletes, Albert Bandura argues that it is the resiliency of self-efficacy in the face of being pounded by uninterrupted failure that provides the motivational support necessary for continuing the persistent effort needed for competent functioning and the development of expertise (Bandura, 1989).

Mastry goals and Performance goals

As summarized in Table 9.3, the two main achievement goals are mastery goals and performance goals (Ames & Archer, 1988; Dweck, 1986; Kaplan & Maehr, 2007; Nicholls, 1984; Spence & Helmreich, 1983). The two goals differ from one another in terms of the person's understanding as to what constitutes competence (Elliot & McGregor, 1999). With mastery goals, the person facing the standard of excellence seeks to develop greater com- petence, make progress, improve the self, and overcome challenges through intense and persistent effort. Achieving a mastery goal means making progress according to a self-set standard. With performance goals, the person facing the standard of excellence seeks to demonstrate or prove competence, display high ability, outperform others, and succeed with little apparent effort. Achieving a performance goal means doing better than others.

Entrepreneurship

David McClelland (1965, 1987) finds that high-need achievers often display the behavioral pattern of entrepreneurship. He assessed the need for achievement in a group of college students and then waited 14 years to check on the occupational choices they made. Each occupation was classified as either entrepreneurial (e.g., founder of own business, stock- broker) or not (e.g., service personnel). Results confirmed that most entrepreneurs were high-need achievers in college. Entrepreneurship appeals to the high-need achiever because it requires taking moderate risks and assuming responsibility for one's successes and failures. It also provides concrete, rapid performance feedback (e.g., moment-to-moment profits and losses), feedback that generates emotions such as pride and satisfaction, and feedback that allows one to diagnose personal competence and rate of improvement on a continual basis. High-need achievers prefer just about any occupation that offers challenge, independent work, personal responsibility, and rapid performance feedback.

New Information

As you read books, listen to the radio, watch television, attend lectures, view Web sites, and interact with others, you expose yourself to opportunities to contradict your beliefs. One group of researchers followed the Seekers, a cult-like group convinced that their city and the entire western coast of the Americas would be destroyed by a great flood on a specific day (Festinger, Riecken, & Schachter, 1956, 1958). On the day before the flood, the group was told that a man would appear at the leader's house at midnight to take them to a flying saucer. Midnight came and passed with no knock on the door, so the Seekers found their cherished belief of doom unequivocally disconfirmed. Given belief disconfirmation, what were the dissonance-suffering Seekers to do? A few did reject their belief and dropped out of the group. Most Seekers, however, were more rationalizing than rational. They saw the disconfirmation as a test of their commitment to the cause (the world was saved because of their faith!) and responded with strong, persistent attempts at proselytizing. By prose- lytizing, the latter group tried to resolve their dissonance by recruiting new people who would agree with their beliefs (i.e., add new consonant beliefs). Quite literally, each new convert allowed the Seekers to reduce their dissonance that the predicted cataclysm never materialized.

Goal Setting

At a general level, a goal is whatever an individual is striving to accomplish (Locke, 1996). When people strive to earn $100, make a 4.0 GPA, graduate from college, sell 100 boxes of Girl Scout cookies, exercise for 30 minutes, or go undefeated in an athletic season, they engage in goal-directed behavior. More specifically, a goal is a future-focused cognitive representation of a desired end state that guides behavior. Like plans, goals generate motivation by focusing people's attention on the discrepancy (or incongruity) between their present level of accomplishment (no boxes of cookies sold) and their ideal level of accomplishment (100 boxes sold by the end of the month). Researchers refer to this discrepancy between present level of accomplishment and ideal level of accomplishment as a "goal-performance discrepancy".

Combined Approach and Avoidance tendencies

Atkinson conceptualized Ms as a motivational force to seek out achievement situations and Maf as a motivational force to escape from (or be anxious about) achievement situations. Thus, to engage in any achievement task is to enter into a risk-taking dilemma in which the person struggles to find a balance between the attraction of pride, hope, and social respect on the one hand versus the repulsion of shame, fear, and social humiliation on the other hand. When Ts is greater than Taf, the person approaches the opportunity to test personal competence against the standard of excellence, but when Taf is greater than Ts, the person hesitates or avoids the opportunity altogether. Atkinson's complete formula for predicting the tendency to achieve (Ta) and hence for displaying achievement-related behaviors (i.e., choice, latency, effort, and persistence) is as follows: Ta=Ts−Taf =(Ms×Ps×Is)−(Maf ×Pf ×If) Although the model can appear to be overwhelming at first, in actuality one needs to know only three variables: the individual's approach motive (Ms), the individual's avoid- ance motive (Maf), and the probability of success (Ps) on the task at hand. Notice that Is, Pf, and If are all calculated solely from the value of Ps [if Ps = .3, then Is = .7, Pf = .7, and If = .3]. If you work through several numerical examples, you will find two general princi- ples that underlie the numerical value for Ta. First, Ta is highest when Ts is greater than Taf and lowest when Taf is greater than Ts (a personality factor). Second, Ta is highest when Ps equals .5 and lowest when Ps is around .9 (task is too easy to generate an incentive to succeed) or .1 (task is too difficult to be motivating).

Autonomy

Autonomy is the psychological need to experience self-direction and personal endorsement in the initiation and regulation of one's behavior. Behavior is autonomous (or self-determined) when our interests, preferences, and wants guide our decision-making process to engage or not engage in a particular activity. We are not self-determining (i.e., our behaviors are determined by others) when some outside force takes our sense of choice away and, instead, pressures us to think, feel, or behave in particular ways. The items in Table 6.1 illustrate perceived autonomy as a trait — as an enduring person- ality characteristic—but perceived autonomy is more typically experienced as a state—as a moment-to-moment experience of personal endorsement versus feeling controlled, pressured, or coerced by outside forces. Thus, perceived autonomy can vary from moment to moment, from situation to situation, and from relationship to relationship.

Conditions that Satisfy the Affiliation Need

Because it is largely a deficit-oriented motive, the need for affiliation, when satisfied, brings out emotions like relief rather than joy. When interacting with others, people high in the need for affiliation go out of their way to avoid conflict, avoid competitive situations, are unselfish and cooperative, avoid talking about others in a negative way, and resist making imposing demands on others. They are sometimes described as "meek." High-affiliation-need individuals prefer careers that provide positive relationships and support for others (the helping professions; Sid & Lindgren, 1981), and they perform especially well under conditions that support their need to be accepted and included. When told that others will be evaluating them, high-affiliation-need people experience relatively high levels of anxiety via a fear of rejection (Byrne, 1961). Social acceptance, approval, and reassurance constitute the need-satisfying conditions for people high in the need for affiliation. Because it is largely a growth-oriented motive, people satisfy the need for intimacy through achieving closeness and warmth in a relationship.

Failure Tolerance

Before people will engage freely in optimally challenging tasks, the social context must tolerate (even value!) failure and error making. Error tolerance, failure tolerance, and risk taking rest on the belief that we learn more from failure than we do from success. Failure produces unique oppor- tunities for learning because it has its constructive aspects when people identify its causes and when failure feedback prompts people to try new strategies, to seek advice, and to expose themselves to further instruction (Clifford, 1984). People most prefer to seek out optimal challenges (rather than easy successes) when they find themselves in social envi- ronments that are autonomy-supportive and failure-tolerant, rather than controlling and failure-intolerant.

Resuming

Implementation intentions also help people finish up their uncompleted goals. Workers who began to write a letter of correspondence were interrupted, and half were then asked to form an implementation intention while the others were not. When the two groups of workers returned to their desks, those with an intention to finish the letters upon their return (imple- mentation intention) completed their unfinished business to a greater degree than were those who were similarly interrupted but who did not harbor an implementation intention to cope with the interruption.

Emotionality

Before performers begin an activity, they typically spend time thinking about how they will perform. Persons with a strong sense of efficacy attend to the demands and challenges of the task; visualize competent scenarios for forthcoming behaviors; and exude enthu- siasm, optimism, and interest. Persons with a weak sense of efficacy, however, dwell on personal deficiencies; visualize formidable obstacles; and exude pessimism, anxiety, and depression (Bandura, 1986, 1988). Once performance begins and things start to go awry, strong self-efficacy beliefs keep anxiety at bay. People who doubt their efficacy, however, are quickly threatened by difficulties, react to setbacks and negative feedback with distress, and see their attention drift toward personal deficiencies and negative emotionality Life in general brings any number of potentially threatening events (e.g., examinations, public performances, physical and psychological threats), and perceived self-efficacy plays a central role in determining how much stress and anxiety such events bring to any individ- ual performer. Rather than existing as a fixed property of events, "threat" always depends on the relation a person has to the task (Folkman & Lazarus, 1985; Lazarus & Folkman, 1984). Knowing that one's coping abilities cannot handle an event's perceived demands conjures up thoughts of disaster, emotional arousal, and feelings of distress and anxiety (Bandura et al., 1982, 1985; Lazarus, 1991a). More optimistically, when people plagued with self-doubt undergo therapy-like conditions to enhance their coping capabilities, the intimidating event that once conjured up such an avalanche of doubt, dread, and distress no longer does so (Bandura & Adams, 1977; Bandura et al., 1980, 1982; Ozer & Bandura, 1990). As self-efficacy increases, fear and anxiety slip away. Self-efficacy researchers go so far as to say that the root cause of anxiety is low self-efficacy (Bandura, 1983, 1988). Therefore, any increase in efficacy means a corresponding decrease in anxiety.

Affect and Feelings

Behavior involves getting from here to there. It involves getting from the present state to the ideal state. But it also matters how quickly or how slowly one gets from here to there. Because the rate of discrepancy reduction matters, affect or feelings are important. If a person is making a satisfactory rate of progress to reduce a goal discrepancy (e.g., I need to be at the bus stop before 2:00 pm and, as I walk, I can tell that I am going to arrive early and catch the bus), positive affect arises. If, however, the same person is making an unsatisfactory rate of progress toward discrepancy reduction (I need to be at the bus stop before 2:00 pm but, as I walk, I can tell that I am going to be late and miss the bus), negative affect arises. Positive affect (positive feelings) means that you are doing better at something than you need to be doing; negative affect (negative feelings) means that you are doing worse. Thus, feelings such as hope, excitement, eagerness, and enthusiasm signal that you are doing better than you need to, while feelings such as joy, delight, and bliss signal that you are going much better. Similarly, feeling frustrated signals that you are doing worse than you need to, feeling discouraged signals you are doing much worse, feeling sad signals you are doing much, much worse, and feeling depressed signals that you are doing much, much, much worse than you need to being doing. These later feelings of frustration, irritation, and anxiety make sense because they energize effort and facilitate discrepancy reduction, but feelings such as sadness, despair, and depression mean that effort is perceived as futile and one would be smarter to quit than to persist.

Verbal Persuasion

Coaches, parents, teachers, employers, therapists, peers, spouses, friends, audiences, clergy, authors of self-help books, infomercials, inspirational posters, happy-face stickers, and songs on the radio often attempt to convince us that we can competently execute a given action—despite our entrenched inefficacy—if we will just try (e.g., "I know you can do it!"). When effective, pep talks persuade the performer to focus more on personal strengths and potentials and less on personal weaknesses and deficiencies. Pep talks shift a per- former's attention from sources of inefficacy to sources of efficacy. But verbal persuasion goes only so far if it is contradicted by actual experience (Schunk, 1995). Its effectiveness is limited by the boundaries of the possible (in the mind of the performer) and depends on the credibility, expertise, and trustworthiness of the persuader. Individuals also give them- selves pep talks, usually in the form of self-instruction, that can boost efficacy, at least for a little while (Schunk & Cox, 1986). Verbal persuasion works to the extent that it provides the performer with enough of a temporary and provisional efficacy boost to generate the motivation necessary for another try (Schunk, 1991).

Self-Perception Theory

Cognitive dissonance theory argues that people develop and change their beliefs in response to a negative motivational-emotional state born in cognitive contradiction (i.e., a core "I am a good person" mindset that is contradicted by behavior that suggests "I am not a good person."). Self-perception theory argues that people develop and change their beliefs for a reason that does not involve a mindset. It offers the alternative interpretation that people develop and change their behavior based simply on self-observation (Bem, 1967, 1972; Bem & McConnell, 1970). For example, we eat squid for whatever reason (maybe we did not know it was squid because the restaurant referred to it as calamari) and after doing so we presume that since we ate squid, we must therefore like it. Both cognitive dissonance theory and self-perception theory revolve around the tenet that "saying, or doing, is believing." The difference between the two theories is that cognitive dissonance theory argues that beliefs change because of negative affect from cognitive inconsistencies, whereas self-perception theory argues that we simply come to believe whatever we do and say.

Mental Simulations

Consider a series of studies designed explicitly to test the advice to "visualize success". In these studies, participants either (1) focused on the goal they wished to attain, (2) focused on how to attain the goal, or (3) did not focus on anything in particular (a control group). Focusing on the goal actually interfered with goal attainment! Visualizing success backfired. Focusing on how to accomplish the goal, however, did facilitate goal attainment. These data are important because (1) they draw out the distinction between the content of a goal (what one is striving for) and the process of goal striving (the means one uses to attain the goal), and (2) once a goal has been set, it does not inevitably and automatically translate itself into effective performance.

Contingency

Contingency refers to the objective relation between a person's behavior and the environ- ment's outcomes. The environment can be the home, classroom, workplace, sports field, hospital, interpersonal relationship, psychology laboratory, and so on. Contingency exists on a continuum that ranges from outcomes that occur on a random, noncontingent basis (i.e., uncontrollable outcomes) to outcomes that occur in perfect synchronization with a person's voluntary behavior (i.e., controllable outcomes). That is, how contingent any one environment is can be scored on a continuum that ranges from 0 (uncontrollable outcomes) to 1 (controllable outcomes).

Implicit Needs

Implicit motives are enduring, nonconscious needs that motivate people's behavior toward the attainment of specific social incentives. Implicit means unconscious. An implicit motive is a psychological need that is implied or inferred from the person's characteristic thought, emotions, and behavior. The unconscious need exerts a continual and enduring influence on what the person thinks about, feels, and does. Implicit motives stand in contrast to explicit motive

Different Goal-Striving Strategies

Depending on one's regulatory mindset, goal striving is carried out in one of two dif- ferent ways. With a promotion focus, the gain-based strategy can be characterized as open-mindedness, exploration, locomotion, acting fast, and eager approach. Locomotion means taking action to move from the present state to an ideal state. It corresponds colloquially with the slogan, "just do it." With a prevention focus, the safety-based strategy can be characterized as being cautious, staying committed, staying the course, protecting one's commitments, playing it safe, assessing where one stands, and being vigilant. Assessment means critically evaluating whether the status quo (an "ought to" standard) has been maintained. It corresponds colloquially with the slogan, "do the right thing." These two different goal-striving strategies raise the question of which strategy is the better or more productive of the two—is it better to act to accomplish something, or is it better to act responsibly and play it safe? Interestingly, the answer to that question depends on one's regulatory mindset. When the person with a promotion focus pursues a goal such as "earn a high GPA" with eager locomotion, such behaviors "feel right" and produce a greater sense of enjoyment and satisfaction.

Different Definitions of Success and Failure

Depending on one's regulatory mindset, success and failure mean different things (Higgins, 1997). For a person with a promotion focus, success means the presence of a gain. The person strives to attain a positive outcome, and that positive outcome takes the form of some type of advancement or improved state of affairs. Success means that change has occurred, and that one has been able to advance a "present state" closer to a desired "ideal state." Success has special meaning—namely, that something good has happened. Failure, on the other hand, means a nongain. It represents an inability to improve upon one's current state. For a person with a promotion focus, failure does not have a special meaning; it is largely a nonevent because the person is still the same as before (e.g., one's present self persists). For the promotion-focused individual, failure is not motivating, while success feeds into and motivationally energizes the system (e.g., re-energizes one's eagerness to accomplish).

Developmental Growth

Developmental growth refers to how agentic, mature, responsible, authentic, interpersonally connected, self-motivating, efficacious, and self-regulating the person is, while developmental regression refers to how apathetic, immature, irresponsible, pretentious, interpersonally alienated, indolent, helpless, and dependent on others the person is. The fruits of personal growth can be seen in developmental outcomes such as effective functioning, deep and enduring interests, learning, talent and skill development, a sense of self-worth, a lack of anxiety and conflict, and personality integration with a sense of wholeness and identity.

Feedback

Difficult, specific, and self-concordant goals enhance performance, but one additional variable is crucial in making goal setting effective: feedback. Goal setting translates into increased performance only in the context of timely feedback that doc- uments the performer's progress in relation to the goal. Feedback, or knowledge of results, allows people to keep track of any progress toward their goal that may occur. In other words, a performer needs both a goal and feedback to maximize performance.

Drinking Alcohol

Drinking alcohol is an opportunity to involve one's need for power as well as to accentuate it (Fodor, 2010). When people drink, they generally report feeling stronger and less inhibited. Thus, people who have strong power motivation typically find drinking alcohol to be a gateway to enhanced personal dominance. It is also a gateway to become disinhibited from social constraints, and particularly to be released from those social constraints that involve aggression and exploitive sex. When drinkers write imaginative stories to the Picture Story Exercise, alcohol consumption leads them to write more power-oriented stories. And people who drink the most are often the power-striving individuals. Thus, power strivings and drinking alcohol seem to go together like peanut butter and jelly.

Effort Justification

During initiation rituals in the military, fraternities, sororities, athletic teams, neighbor- hood gangs, reality television shows, and other groups, recruits often exert great effort and perform extreme behaviors that must later be justified. Consider the Army private who parachutes out of an airplane as part of boot-camp training. For novice recruits, parachuting is extreme behavior. To justify why they would put their lives on the line like this, privates typically endorse a rather extreme liking for the behavior. Extreme behaviors breed extreme beliefs: "If I did that, then I must really love this place!" Dissonance theory proposes that the attractiveness of a task increases as a direct function of the magnitude of effort expended to complete it (Aronson & Mills, 1959; Beauvois & Joule, 1996; Rosenfeld, Giacalone, & Tedeschi, 1984). People who engage in extreme behavior need to develop correspondingly extreme values (Aronson, 1988

Learned Helplessness

Efficacy expectancies are the building blocks of self-efficacy, and outcome expectancies are the building blocks of learned helplessness. When people engage in a task, some outcome is typically at stake. During such task engagement, people make a subjective forecast of how controllable versus uncontrollable the outcome at stake is. For controllable outcomes, a one-to-one relation exists between behavior (what a person does) and outcomes (what happens to that person). For uncontrollable outcomes, a random relationship exists between behavior and outcomes (e.g., "I have no idea what effect, if any, my behavior will have on what happens to me").

Self-Efficacy

Efficacy expectations center on questions such as the following: "Can I perform well on this particular task?" and "If things start to go wrong during my performance, do I have the resources within me to cope well and turn things around for the better?" But efficacy expectations and self-efficacy are not quite the same thing. Self-efficacy is a more generative capacity in which the individual (i.e., the "self" in self-efficacy) organizes and orchestrates his or her skills to cope with the demands and circumstances he or she faces. It is the capac- ity to use one's personal resources well under diverse and trying circumstances. Formally, self-efficacy is defined as one's judgment of how well (or poorly) one will cope with a situation, given the skills one possesses and the circumstances one faces (Bandura, 1986, 1993, 1997).

Emotional Deficits

Emotional deficits consist of affective disruptions in which lethargic, depressive emotional reactions occur in situations that call for active, assertive emotion. In the face of trauma, the natural and typical human response is one of highly mobilized emotion (e.g., fear, anger, assertiveness, frustration). When afraid, people struggle vigorously to overcome, escape, counteract, or do whatever is necessary to cope effectively. Over time, however, an unre- lenting onslaught of environmental unresponsiveness leads people to view coping as futile. Once fear-mobilized emotionality is believed to be unproductive, depression-related emo- tionality takes its place. Once the person becomes convinced that there is nothing that can be done to escape the trauma, the resulting expectation makes energy-mobilizing emo- tions less likely and makes energy-depleting emotions (e.g., listlessness, apathy, depression) more likely.

Engagement

Engagement refers to how actively involved the person is in the activity at hand. When highly engaged, people pay attention, exert effort, persist in the face of challenge and obstacles, think strategically, set goals and make plans, ask questions, and contribute constructively into the flow of whatever they are doing. Organismic theories of motivation argue that the motivation for such initiative is the person's psychological needs. The young rock-skipping girl introduced in the chapter's opening vignette ideally illustrates such motivated engagement, because she pursued her own goals (to feel autonomous) and strove for effectance and improvement (to feel competent).

Interdependency between Challenge and Feedback

Everyone is challenged every day. In school, teachers put examinations in front of students. At work, projects and assignments test a person's writing and creativity skills. On the drive home, the interstate challenges both our patience and our driving skills. If the car breaks down, our automotive repair skills will be put to the test. These situations set the stage for challenge. But setting the stage is not the same thing as actually creating the challenge experience itself. One additional ingredient still needs to be tossed into the equation — feedback. Confronting a test, project, or contest invites challenge, but a person does not experience challenge until he or she begins to perform and receive the first glimpse of feedback. It is at that point—facing a challenge and receiving initial performance feedback—that people report the psychological experience of being challenged (Reeve & Deci, 1996). Professional musicians and athletes often echo this insight when they report that their pre-performance feelings of anxiety turn immediately into an experience of challenge with "the first pitch" or "the first keystroke on the piano."

Competence

Everyone wants and strives to be competent. Everyone desires to interact effectively with his or her surroundings, and this desire extends into all aspects of our lives—in school, at work, in relationships, and during recreation and sports. We all want to develop skills and improve our capacities, talents, and potential. When we find ourselves face to face with a challenge, we give the moment our full attention. When given the opportunity to test, expand, and grow and develop our skills, we all want to do well and make progress. When we do so, we feel satisfied, even happy and fulfilled. In other words, we have a need for competence. Competence is the psychological need to be effective in interactions with the environment, and it reflects the desire to exercise and extend one's capacities and skills and, in doing so, to seek out and master optimal and developmentally appropriate challenges. Competence is the psychological need that generates the willing- ness to seek out optimal challenges, take them on, and exert persistent effort and strategic thinking until we master them. When we engage in a task that offers a level of difficulty and complexity that is precisely right for our current skills and talents, our psychological need for competence is involved; we feel interest. When we make progress on developing and extending our skills, our psychological need for competence is satisfied; we feel enjoyment.

Supporting Autonomy

External events, social contexts, interpersonal relationships, and cultures all vary in how much versus how little they support versus thwart a person's need for autonomy. When these environmental influences tap into, involve, vitalize, and nurture a person's need for autonomy, they are referred to as "autonomy supportive"; when these environmental influ- ences neglect or try to silence and thwart a person's need for autonomy, they are referred to as "controlling". Formally, autonomy support is what- ever one person says and does to nurture the other's psychological need for autonomy. This is usually done by first taking the other's perspective and then working hard to identify, nurture, and vitalize the other's inner motivational resources (e.g., make a learning activ- ity more interesting or relevant to the student's personal goals), while control is whatever one person says and does to suppress the other's psychological need for autonomy. Behavioral control is usually done by first ignoring or discounting the other's perspective and then pressuring the other toward compliance with a prescribed way of thinking, feeling, or behaving (e.g., "I don't care if you are tired, get the work done by noon, or else."). To distin- guish between autonomy support and behavioral control, Table 6.2 provides the definition, enabling conditions, and interpersonal behaviors associated with both autonomy support and behavioral control (Reeve, 2009).

Mastery Versus Helplessness

Failure means the person was not able to gain control over a desired outcome, and people cope with failure in different ways. A mastery motivational orientation refers to a hardy, resistant portrayal of the self during encounters of failure. With a mastery motivational ori- entation, the person responds to failure by remaining task-oriented and focused on achieving mastery in spite of difficulties and setbacks (Diener & Dweck, 1978, 1980). On the other hand, a helpless motivational orientation refers to a fragile view of the self during encoun- ters of failure. With a helpless motivational orientation, the person responds to failure by giving up and withdrawing, acting as if the situation were out of his or her control (Dweck, 1975; Dweck & Repucci, 1973).

Goal Striving

Goal setting seems so promising, so ripe with potential, as a motivational intervention strat- egy for helping people accomplish the sorts of things they wish to accomplish (see Box 8). The self-help books in the mega bookstores agree, because they advise readers to set goals and to focus their full attention on these goals. If you want to make better grades, lose 10 pounds, save a ton of money, or be successful in love and work, then you must visualize the goal you want. Think it—be it, they say. Focus on it, visualize it, see the new you with goal in hand. Unfortunately, motivational processes are not that simple, because goal set- ting needs a great deal of goal striving — effort, persistence, focused attention, and strategic planning—to translate into increased performance and goal attainment. The gap between adopting a goal and actually attaining it can be wide.

Physiological State

Fatigue, pain, muscle tension, mental confusion, and trembling hands are physiological signals that the demands of the task currently exceed the performer's capacity to cope with those demands (Taylor et al., 1985). An abnormal physiological state is a private, yet attention-getting, message that contributes to one's sense of inefficacy. An absence of tension, fear, anxiety, and stress, on the other hand, heightens efficacy by providing first- hand bodily feedback that one can indeed cope adequately with task demands (Bandura & Adams, 1977). The causal direction between efficacy and physiological activity is bidi- rectional: Inefficacy heightens arousal and heightened arousal feeds back to fuel perceived inefficacy (Bandura et al., 1988). Physiological information communicates efficacy infor- mation most when initial efficacy is uncertain (one is performing a task for the first time). When efficacy is relatively assured, people sometimes discount, or even reinterpret, their physiological cues as a positive source of efficacy, as in "I'm pumped up for this" (Carver & Blaney, 1977).

Perceived Control: Self, Action, and Control

Figure 10.1 puts the interrelationships between Person, Behavior, and Outcome at the center of expectancy motivation. Some researchers prefer using the alternative terminology of Self → Action → Control to communicate this same idea (Skinner, 1996), so Figure 10.2 presents this alternative (but interchangeable) terminology. As shown in the figure, the defining relation in the study of perceived control is that of Self (Agent) → Control (Ends). People express this Self → Control relation in everyday questions such as, "Can I improve my health?", "Can I improve my marriage?", and "Can I earn a scholarship?" In other words, perceived control revolves around how the Self (Agent) can exert Control (Ends). Figure 10.2, like Figure 10.1, shows how perceived control can be broken down into the more basic questions of "Can I cope effectively?" (Self → Action) and "Will my coping improve my health, marriage, or scholarship prospects?" (Action → Control).

Origins of Fixed-Growth Mindsets

Fixed-growth mindsets are cognitive frameworks that are learned, and this suggests the possibility that entity versus incremental thinking is a product of one's socialization history. One way that children acquire the fixed versus growth mindset is through the praise and criticism they receive from their parents and teachers because praise and criticism send children subtle or not-so-subtle signals about the nature of their personal qualities and abilities. With ability praise, parental and teacher feedback essentially judges the child's personal qualities (e.g., you are so smart, you are very bad), and this judgment tends to grow in children a fixed mindset and an entity-oriented meaning system. Alternatively, with effort praise, parental and teacher feed- back essentially comments on the child's underlying coping style (e.g., you worked so hard, you did not try as hard as the other kids), and this commentary tends to grow in children a growth mindset and an incremental-oriented meaning system.

Different Fixed-Growth Mindsets Lead to Different Achievement Goals

Fixed-growth mindsets are important to achievement strivings because they guide the type of goals people pursue (Dweck, 1999; Dweck & Elliot, 1983; Elliot & Dweck, 1988). In achievement situations, people with a fixed mindset (entity theorists) generally adopt per- formance goals. People who adopt performance goals are concerned with looking smart and with not looking dumb. That is, they are concerned with performing well, especially while others are watching. The goal is therefore to use performance as the means to prove that one has much of a desirable characteristic (i.e., intelligence). In contrast, people with a growth mindset (incremental theorists) generally adopt mastery goals in achievement situations. People who adopt mastery goals are concerned with mastering something new or different and with learning or understanding something thoroughly. That is, they are concerned with learning and improving as much as they can. The goal is therefore to use task engagements to improve—to get smarter by learning something new or important.

Meaning of Effort

For the person with a fixed mindset, the meaning of effort is "the more you try, the dumber you therefore must be." High effort means low ability. High effort is, in fact, evidence that the performer lacks ability. For the person with a growth mindset, the meaning of effort is that it is a tool, the means by which people turn on and vitalize the development of their skills and abilities. Given this introduction, consider your own reaction to the following: You see a puzzle in a science magazine and it's labeled "Test your IQ!" You work on it for a very long time, get confused, start over and over, and finally make progress, but very slowly, until you solve it. How do you feel? Do you feel sort of dumb because it required so much effort? Or, do you feel smart because you worked hard and mastered it?

Goal Difficulty

Goal difficulty refers to how hard a goal is to accomplish. As goals increase in difficulty, performance increases in a linear fashion. Relative to goals such as scoring 80 on a test, running a mile in 10 minutes, and making one new friend at a social event, more difficult goals would be scoring 90 on a test, running a mile in 8 minutes, and making two new friends. The more difficult the goal, the more it energizes the performer. This is so because people exert effort in proportion to what the goal requires of them. That is, easy goals stimulate little effort, medium goals stimulate moderate effort, and difficult goals stimulate high effort. Effort responds to the magnitude of goal difficulty, which is to say that effort responds to the magnitude of the goal-performance discrepancy.

Criticisms

Goal setting has its advantages, but it also has its cautions and pitfalls. A first caution associated with goal setting is that it works best when tasks are relatively uninteresting and require only a straightforward procedure, as shown with tasks such as adding numbers, typing, proofreading, assembling nuts and bolts, and sit-ups. Goal setting aids performance on uninteresting, straightforward tasks by generating motivation that the task itself cannot generate (because it is so boring on its own). For tasks that are inherently interesting and require creativity or problem solving, goal setting does not enhance performance, because inherently interesting tasks generate effort, persistence, attention, and strategic planning on their own. A second caution associated with goal setting is goal conflict. People rarely pursue only one goal at a time and instead pursue goals that sometimes conflict with one another . The goal-setting process basically says "pay attention here, not there" and "there" might involve an important goal as well. For instance, one goal to travel in Asia during the summer will likely conflict another goal to save money. In the same spirit, goal pursuit can lead to goal overload and stress.

Goal Specificity

Goal specificity refers to how clearly a goal informs the performer precisely what he is to do. Telling a performer to "do your best" sounds like goal setting, but it is actually only an ambiguous statement that does not make clear precisely what the person is to do. On the other hand, telling a writer to have a first draft in one week, a revised draft in two weeks, and a final manuscript in three weeks specifies more precisely what the writer is to do and when she is to do it. Translating a vague goal into a specific goal typically involves restating the goal in numerical terms, although it generally just means being very specific in what you are asking the other person to do (e.g., instead of "be nice," a more specific goal would be to "greet all guests proactively, smile, open your arms, call them by name, offer a refreshment, and tell them that you are glad that they are here").

Difficult, Specific Goals Enhance Performance

Goals do not always enhance performance. Only those goals that are difficult, specific, and self-congruent do so. Anyone who has simply listed a number of goals to accomplish (e.g., a "to do list") knows that there is a difference between having a goal and actually accomplishing it. The reason difficult, specific, self-concordant goals increase performance while easy, vague, and self-discordant ones do not is motivational. Difficult goals energize the per- former, specific goals direct that energy toward a particular course of action, and concordant goals both energize and direct the performer.

Health

Health refers to the functional efficiency of the mind and body and to the absence of ill- ness, disease, and pathology. The variable that best predicts health-related outcomes is the person's behavior, and people are more likely to initiate and sustain a health-promoting lifestyle when their psychological needs are met. The more environments and relationships (e.g., with doctors, dentists, healthcare providers) support the person's psychological needs, the more that person tends toward healthy behaviors, such as eating fruits and vegetables , exercising , brushing and flossing, and taking pre- scribed medicine and positive health outcomes, such as losing weight , abstaining from smoking, improving oral health and dental well-being, persisting in alcohol treatment, and engaging in effective self-management of one's glucose.

Learning Helplessness

Helplessness is learned. Consider the following experiment with three groups of dogs that were administered either (1) inescapable shock, (2) escapable shock, or (3) no shock (control group) (Seligman & Maier, 1967). Dogs in the two shock groups were placed into a sling and given mild 5-second electric shocks once a day for 64 consecutive days. In the inescapable shock group, the shocks occurred randomly, and no response could terminate the shock. Whether the dog barked, howled, or thrashed about frantically, the shock continued for its full 5 seconds. In other words, the shock was inescapable. The outcome (shock) was uncontrollable. In the escapable shock group, the dogs could terminate the shock. If the dog pressed a button mounted on the wall (placed just in front of their noses), the shock stopped. The dogs therefore had a response available to escape the shock—push the button. They had to learn the response, but the outcome (shock) was controllable. In the no-shock control group, dogs were placed into a sling just like the dogs in the other two conditions were but they received no shocks.

Achievement in the classroom

Hence, to promote mastery rather than performance goals, teachers (and coaches, par- ents, managers, etc.; see Duda, 2005, for an overview of achievement goals in sport) can define success as improvement, value effort, communicate that satisfaction comes from hard work, focus on how students learn, view errors as a natural and welcomed part of the learning process, explain the utility of effort when trying to learn something new, and assess (grade) students on their extent of improvement and progress. When teachers intentionally create such a learning climate, students are more likely to adopt mastery over performance goals (Maehr & Midgley, 1996; Meece & Miller, 1999).

Moderately Difficult Tasks

High-need achievers (Ms > Maf) outperform low-need achievers (Maf > Ms) on moderately difficult tasks. High-need achievers do not, however, outperform low-need achievers on easy or difficult tasks. Performance on a moderately difficult task activates in the high achiever a set of positive emotional and cognitive incentives not socialized into the low achiever. Emotionally, moderately difficult tasks provide an arena for best testing skills and experiencing emotions such as pride and satisfaction. Cognitively, moderately difficult tasks provide an arena for best diagnosing one's sense of competence and level of ability. Hence, moderately challenging tasks provide a mixture of pride from success and information to diagnose abilities that motivates high-need achievers more than it does low-need achievers.

Ways of Coping

How much mastery over outcomes one possesses depends on how one elects to cope with the situation at hand. Table 10.1 lists many possible ways of coping (Skinner, Edge, Altman, & Sherwood, 2003). People can cope by taking proactive or reactive action, by approaching the problem and taking action or by avoiding it and walking away, singly or in the context of a group or an organization, by focusing on the problem to be solved or by focusing on regulating their emotions, and by additional ways of coping, as illustrated in the table.

Dissonance-Arousing Situations

Human beings frequently encounter information or engage in behavior that is dissonant with their self-view. Four dissonance-arousing circumstances that bring on this hard-to-reconcile "I did one thing, yet believe the opposite" experience include choice, insufficient justifica- tion, effort justification, and new information.

Aggression

If the need for power revolves around desires for impact, control, and influence, aggression ought to be one means for both involving and satisfying one's power needs. To some extent, the relationship between the need for power and aggression holds true, as men high in power strivings get into more arguments and participate more frequently in competitive sports. However, the relationship between the need for power and aggression is diluted because society largely controls and inhibits people's acts of overt aggression. For this reason, aggressive manifestations of the need for power largely express themselves as impulses to (rather than actual acts of) aggression. Males and females with high needs for power report significantly more impulses to act aggressively (McClelland, 1975). When asked, "Have you ever felt like carrying out the following: yelling at someone in traffic, throwing things around the room, destroying fur- niture or breaking glassware, or insulting clerks in stores?" individuals high in the need for power report significantly more impulses to carry out these acts.

How Social Needs Motivate Behavior

Implicit motives—the needs for achievement, affiliation, and power—are activated and aroused by a specific class of social incentives. • High achievement strivings: Feel interest, joy, arousal, excitement, and a sense of opportunity when given a difficult challenge with immediate diagnostic feedback about your performance. Feel happy when you pursue goals such as winning, diag- nosing personal competence, and improving the self, as often happens in sports and various domains of risk-taking (e.g., investing in stocks, entrepreneurship). • High affiliation strivings: Feel calmness accompanied by warm, positive affect in situations that offer comfort and interpersonal security (Wirth & Schultheiss, 2006). Feel happy when pursuing activities such as cuddling (family in bed together on a Saturday morning) or just relaxing with a close friend at the beach. • High power strivings: Feel strong, sharp arousal spikes that generate a burst of epinephrine, testosterone, and increased blood pressure and muscle tone (Hall, Stanton, & Schultheiss, 2010). Feel happy when you pursue activities such as riding a rollercoaster and making a persuasive speech in front of a large audience

Person-Environment Dialectic

In a dialectic, the relationship between person and environment is reciprocal. That is, the environment acts on the person and, in doing so, the person changes. And, the person acts on the environment and, in doing so, the environment changes. Both the person and the environment constantly change.The person-environment dialectic can also be understood as transformational activity. With transformational activity, what the person does transforms what the environment does (e.g., what the child says to the parent transforms what the parent will in turn say and do toward the child). With ongoing transformational activity (the child transforms teacher activity, and the teacher transforms child activity), the relation between the person and the environment is constantly changing (transforming). The outcome of this person-environment transformation can be characterized as moving toward either greater person-environment synthesis or greater person-environment conflict (as discussed in the next section).

Social Needs

In an extensive investigation of how people acquire social needs, one group of researchers sought to determine the childrearing antecedents of adult needs for achieve- ment, affiliation, and power. The finding that few childrearing experiences predict adult motives suggests that social needs can and do develop and change over time. For instance, some occupations foster achievement strivings more than do other occupations, because they provide opportunities for moderate challenges, independent work, personal responsibility for outcomes, and rapid performance feedback.

Implemental Mindset

In an implemental mindset, the person is closed-minded and attention is focused nar- rowly to concentrate only on information that is related to goal attainment (Gollwitzer & Bayer, 1999). The mindset is to shield one's thinking against non-goal-related informa- tion and considerations. More deliberative thinking will only postpone goal striving, not facilitate it. The thinking is as follows: "This has already been decided. While it was once very constructive to consider my options, it is now counterproductive to do so. What I need to do now is focus and shield myself against distractions." During this closed-minded implementation period, the person's thinking is optimistically biased in the evaluation of the desirability and feasibility of the chosen goal (e.g., my chosen romantic relationship will work out well; Puca, 2001). With an implementation mindset, people raise their fore- casted self-efficacy and personal control beliefs about eventual goal attainment (Armor & Taylor, 2003).

Affiliation

In its early study, the need for affiliation was conceptualized as "establishing, maintaining, or restoring a positive, affective relationship with another person or persons". According to this definition, the need for affiliation is not the same construct as extraversion, friendliness, or sociability. In fact, early investigators noted that persons high in the need for affiliation were often less popular than persons low in affiliation strivings. They were less popular, yet keenly aware of the social networks around them (i.e., they knew who was friends with whom). Rather than being rooted in extraversion and popularity, the need for affiliation is rooted in a fear of interpersonal rejection. People with high-need affiliation tend to interact with others so to avoid negative emotions, such as rejection and anger.

Power and Goal Pursuit

Individuals high in the need for power more readily acquire the goals and outcomes they seek than do individuals low in the need for power. Power increases approach tendencies and decreases inhibitory tendencies. High power and taking action go together. During negotiations, for instance, high-power individuals are more likely to express anger, and this strategy often gets them what they want, largely because they are seen as tough negotiators who win concessions from others.

Insufficient Justification

Insufficient justification addresses how people explain actions for which they have little or no external prompting (Festinger & Carlsmith, 1959). For example, people might ask themselves why they donated money to a charity or why they stopped to pick up litter. To justify such unprompted action, people routinely and perhaps necessarily add new con- sonant beliefs to their favorable self-view mindset, such as "I'm generous" and "I'm an environmentalist."

Competition

Interpersonal competition captures much of the risk-taking dilemma inherent in achievement settings. It promotes positive emotion, approach behavior, and improved performance in high-need achievers, but negative emotion, avoidance behaviors, and debilitated performance in low-need achievers. Consider that high-need achievers seek diagnostic ability information, seek opportunities to test their skills, value competence for its own sake, are attracted to self-evaluation opportunities, and enjoy demonstrating or proving their ability. Competition offers all these attributes and is therefore attractive to high-need achievers. For low-need achievers, competition's evaluative pressures arouse mostly anxiety and avoidance.

Benefits from Autonomy Support

Receiving autonomy support provides many important benefits. A summary of these benefits appear in Figure 6.3 and include benefits to one's motivation, engagement, development, learning, performance, and well-being. Autonomy support nurtures not only the psychological need of autonomy, but it also nurtures the full range of inner motivational resources, including competence and relatedness need satisfaction, intrinsic motivation, curiosity, and internalized or self-endorsed values. These experiences of psychological need satisfaction and the vitalization of inner motivational resources then pave the way to gains in and high levels of engagement, development, learning, performance, and well-being.

Behavior

Just as contingency exists on a continuum, coping behavior to attain or to prevent outcomes exists on a continuum. In a traumatic event, for instance, people's voluntary coping behavior varies from very passive to very active. Coping responses can be lethargic and passive, or they can be active and assertive. Lethargy, passivity, and giving up typify a listless, demoralized effort that characterizes the behavior of the helpless individual (recall the passive behavior of the dogs in the inescapable shock group). Alertness, activity, and assertiveness characterize people who are not helpless (who have some expectation of control). To illustrate passive behavior as a component of learned helplessness, consider once again the situations listed earlier (driving on the high- way, job hunting, competing against an opponent). Consider your own passive-to-active coping behaviors in the face of such situations and potential outcomes. The job hunter who quits searching for online advertisements, revising her re_sume_, telephoning prospective employers, and rising early and enthusiastically in the morning to look for a job manifests the listless, demoralized coping behavior that characterizes helplessness.

Tendency to Avoid Failure

Just as people have a need for achievement (Ms), they also have a motive to avoid failure (Maf) (Atkinson, 1957, 1964). The tendency to avoid failure motivates the individual to defend against the loss of self-esteem, the loss of social respect, and the fear of embarrass- ment (Birney, Burdick, & Teevan, 1969). The tendency to avoid failure, abbreviated Taf, is calculated with a formula that parallels that for Ts: Taf = Maf × Pf × If The variable Maf represents the motive to avoid failure, Pf represents the probability of failure (which, by definition, is 1 − Ps), and If represents the negative incentive value for failure (If = 1 − Pf ). Thus, if an individual has a motive to avoid failure of, say, 10, then the tendency to avoid failure on a difficult task (Pf = .9) can be calculated as 0.90 (Maf × Pf ×If, which=10×.9×.1=0.90).

Helplessness Effects

Learned helplessness occurs when people expect that their voluntary behavior will pro- duce little or no effect on the outcomes they strive to attain or avoid. Once it occurs, it leaves three reliable deficits in its wake: motivational, learning, and emotional

Components

Learned helplessness theory features three components: contingency, cognition, and behav- ior (Peterson et al., 1993). Collectively, these three components explain the motivational dynamics that unfold as experience teaches people to expect that the events in their lives will be beyond their personal control.

Learning Deficits

Learning deficits consist of an acquired pessimistic set that interferes with one's ability to learn new response-outcome contingencies. Over time, exposure to uncontrollable envi- ronments cultivates an expectancy in which people believe that outcomes are generally independent of their actions. Once expectancies take on a pessimistic tone, the person has a very difficult time learning (or, more precisely, relearning) that a new response can affect outcomes. This pessimistic set essentially interferes with, or retards, the learning of future response-outcome contingencies (Alloy & Seligman, 1979). When students first learn the results from learned helplessness experiments, they fre- quently wonder why dogs in the inescapable groups do not learn in the second phase of the experiment that jumping over the barrier terminates the shock.

Personal Control Beliefs

Mastery beliefs reflect the extent of perceived control one has over attaining desirable out- comes and preventing aversive ones (Peterson et al., 1993). When personal control beliefs are strong and resilient, the individual perceives a strong causal link between actions and outcomes. When personal control beliefs are weak and fragile, the individual perceives that personal initiatives and actions produce little effect on what happens.

Avoidance Motivation and Ill-Being

Most of the discussion on the topic of achievement motivation focuses on its "approach" side, which is the study of whether and why people exert effort and persistence to exceed a standard of excellence. But the fear of failure is important as well, as it functions as a coun- terforce to achievement strivings by interfering with people's performance, persistence, and emotionality (Birney et al., 1969; Elliot & Sheldon, 1997; Schmalt, 1982). The fear of fail- ure is a functional counterforce because it prompts people to adopt performance-avoidance goals, such as trying to avoid making a mistake, trying to avoid performing poorly, or trying not to embarrass oneself. These avoidance-oriented goals lead people to under- perform, quit quickly, and lose interest in what they are doing (Elliot & Church, 1997; Elliot & Harackiewicz, 1996; Roney, Higgins, & Shah, 1995).

MINDSET 4: COGNITIVE DISSONANCE

Most people see themselves as competent, moral, and reasonable. Most people harbor such a favorable view of themselves that a positive self-view can be understood as a near-universal mindset. This mindset is different from the first three discussed in the present chapter (deliberative-implemental, promotion-prevention, and growth-fixed) in that it is a singular, not a dual, mindset. That is, almost everyone walks around with the mindset "I am a competent, moral, and reasonable person." While practically everyone walks around with this favorable mindset, it is still the case that people all too often engage in behavior that leaves them feeling stupid, immoral, and unreasonable. For instance, people smoke cigarettes, toss litter, tell white lies, neglect to recycle, drive their cars recklessly, skip classes, act rudely toward strangers, and engage in other such hypocritical conduct. When beliefs about who the self is and what the self does are inconsistent (i.e., believing one thing, yet actually behaving in the opposite way), peo- ple experience a psychologically uncomfortable state referred to as "cognitive dissonance" (Aronson, 1969, 1992, 1999; Festinger, 1957; Gerard, 1992; Harmon-Jones & Mills, 1999).

Achievement Goals

Most theories of achievement motivation (those featured in Chapter 7) treat achievement behavior as a choice: Approach the standard of excellence or avoid it. The core question asks whether the person will approach success or avoid failure, and if so, with what intensity, latency, and persistence that choice will be pursued. Achievement goal researchers, how- ever, are more interested in why a person shows achievement behavior rather than whether achievement behavior occurs. This is because we so often in daily life do not so much seek out standards of excellence as we have them forced upon us. That is, we are asked, and are often required, to approach a standard of excellence put before us, as happens at school (a test), at work (a sales quota), in sports (an opponent), and so on. In these sorts of settings, approach behavior is taken for granted (because it is required), and the question becomes why people adopt one type of achievement goal rather than another.

Motivational Deficits

Motivational deficits consist of a decreased willingness to try. Motivational deficits become apparent when a person's willingness to emit voluntary coping responses decreases or disappears altogether. Typically, when people care about an outcome and when the environ- ment is at least somewhat responsive in delivering those outcomes, they act enthusiastically and assertively in bringing about those outcomes. For instance, at the beginning of a season, an athlete might practice diligently and persistently, but after a series of athletic defeats (victory becomes an uncontrollable outcome), willingness to practice wanes. The athlete begins to wonder if the time spent practicing is really worth it. In the aversive-noise learned helplessness experiment described earlier, the experimenters asked participants why they did not use the lever to try to terminate the unpleasant noise (Thorton & Jacobs, 1971). Approximately 60 percent of the participants (from the inescapable noise group) reported that they felt little control over the noise so did not see the point in trying to terminate the noise, saying "Why try?" "Why try?" characterizes the motivational deficit in learned helplessness.

Attributions and Explanatory Style

No motivation theory pursues the "why?" question more than does attribution theory. An attribution is a causal explanation for why a particular success-failure outcome occurred (Weiner, 1985, 1986). After a person succeeds or fails, he or she asks why. Why did I make an A on the test? Why did I lose the contest? Why did I get the job, while she did not? Why did I succeed today on the same task that I failed yesterday? There may be an almost limitless number of possible causal attributions, but when explaining their successes and failures, people tend to rely on a small number of attributions, including effort, ability, strategy, luck, and task difficulty (Weiner, 1986), although other common attributions include intelligence, extent of experience, task enjoyment, or help from others (Shell, Colvin, & Bruning, 1995).

Providing Explanatory Rationales

Nurturing inner motivational resources is a helpful motivational strategy when the task at hand is a potentially interesting thing to do, but sometimes we ask others to do relatively uninteresting things. For instance, parents ask their children to clean their rooms, and teachers ask students to follow the rules. To motivate others on uninteresting tasks, people with an autonomy-supportive style communicate the value, worth, meaning, utility, or importance of engaging in these sorts of behaviors, as in "It is important that you follow the rules because we need to respect the rights of everyone in the class and to help everyone feel safe and accepted." Promoting valuing means adding an explanatory "because" to one's request to explain why the request or activity is truly worth the other's time and effort. People with controlling styles, however, do not take the time to explain why the activity is worth doing, and say things like, "Just get it done," or a nonexplanatory, "Do it because I told you to."

Maintaining Interpersonal Networks

Once a relationship has been established, individuals with a high need for affiliation— involving either affiliation or intimacy motivations—strive to maintain those relationships by making more telephone calls and paying more visits to their friends (actual and online) than do those with a low need for affiliation. One study asked persons with high and low needs for intimacy to keep a logbook over a two-month period on which they were to record 10 20-minute friendship episodes. Those with a high need for intimacy reported more dyadic (vs. larger group) friendship episodes, more self-disclosure, more listening, and more trust and concern for the well-being of their friends. Even when thinking and talking about strangers, high-intimacy-need persons treat others differently than do low-intimacy-need persons, because they use more positive adjectives when describing others, and they avoid talking about others in negative terms.

Self-Efficacy Effects on Behavior

Once formed, self-efficacy beliefs contribute to the quality of human functioning in mul- tiple ways (Bandura, 1986, 1997). Generally speaking, the more people expect that they can adequately perform an action, the more willing they are to put forth effort and per- sist in facing difficulties (Bandura, 1989; Bandura & Cervone, 1983; Weinberg, Gould, & Jackson, 1979). In contrast, when people expect that they cannot adequately perform the required task, they are not willing to engage in activities requiring such behavior. Instead, they slacken their effort, prematurely settle for mediocre outcomes, and quit in the face of obstacles (Bandura, 1989). More specifically, self-efficacy beliefs affect (1) the choice of activities and selection of environments, (2) the extent of effort and persistence put forth during performance, (3) the quality of thinking and decision making during performance, and (4) emotional reactions, especially those related to stress and anxiety. The four sources of efficacy and the four effects of strong versus weak self-efficacy beliefs are organized in summary form in Figure 10.3.

Staying on Track

Once started in the pursuit of a goal, people often face circumstances that were more difficult than they expected. They encounter distractions and demands on their time, and they get interrupted and face the prospect of having to start all over again. But imple- mentation intentions, once set, shield goal striving from potential derailment. People often start an exercise program, start writing a paper, and start the effort to learn a foreign language but, in doing so, difficulties, distractions, alternative demands, and interruptions inevitable surface to compete with the goal striving, as in "I started to read the chapter, but then the phone rang and I never did get back to the book."

Conditions that Involve and Satisfy the Need for Power

Parents of future power-striving children impose very high developmental standards on their children and are willing to sacrifice their parental affection to get their children to live up to their imposed standards (i.e., the tough-minded, cold, and distant parent). The development of power strivings emerges as a reaction to harsh parental criticism and a thwarting of the psychological need for relatedness (or intimacy). What emerges is then a need for prestige and power to tell the world that he or she is not to be taken lightly and, in fact, is worthy of notice, admiration, and respect. Four social conditions are noteworthy in their capacity for involving and satisfying the need for power: leadership, aggressiveness, influential occupations, and prestige possessions.

Power

The essence of the need for power is a desire to make the physical and social world conform to one's personal image or plan for it (Winter & Stewart, 1978). People high in the need for power desire to have "impact, control, or influence over another person, group, or the world at large" (Winter, 1973). • Impact allows power-needing individuals to establish power. • Control allows power-needing individuals to maintain power. • Influence allows power-needing individuals to expand their power.

Displaying Patience

Patience is the calmness one person shows as the other struggles to adjust his behavior from something that is ineffective, indolent, and irresponsible into something that is effective, energized, and responsible. Displaying patience means giving another person the time and space he needs to explore better ways of behaving, to plan and to try out alternative ways of behaving, and to alter personal goals and problem-solving strategies. In practice, what autonomy-supportive patience looks like is a lot of listening, perspective-taking, and postponing of advice until one first deeply understands why the person is acting in an ineffective, indolent, or irresponsible way and second senses that the other is open and ready to hear one's suggestions. Once understood, appropriate and constructive support becomes possible, especially when the other person seems stuck on a problem. This support often involves offering words of encouragement and hints toward progress. In contrast, people who adopt a controlling motivating style impatiently rush in, take over, and show and tell the other person what to do and how to solve the problem (e.g., "Here, let me show you how to do it.").

Listening Empathically, Relying on Informational Language

People are sometimes listless, other times they perform poorly, and other times they behave inappropriately. People who adopt an autonomy-supportive motivating style treat listlessness, poor performance, and inappropriate behavior as motivational problems to be understood and solved rather than as targets for criticism. They listen empathically to understand why the other is struggling motivationally, and they use flexible, noncontrolling, and informational language to work collaboratively with that person to diagnose and solve the motivational problem. For example, a coach might say to her athlete, "I've noticed that your running times have slowed lately. Do you know why this might be?" In contrast, people with a controlling style use a pressuring, rigid, "no-nonsense," and guilt-inducing communication style that says that the other per- son should, must, ought to, or has to do a certain thing (e.g., "You should try harder" or "You must finish that project"). People who adopt a controlling motivating style try to motivate others by inducing feelings of guilt, shame, and anxiety for not performing a requested activity, by threatening to withdraw their approval, by cultivating perfectionist standards, and by offering "conditional regard" more generally.

Choice: Selection of Activities and Environments

People continually make choices about what activities to pursue and which environments to spend time in. In general, people seek out and approach with excitement those activities and situations that they feel capable of adjusting to or handling, while people shun and actively avoid those activities and situations that they see as likely to overwhelm their coping capac- ities (Bandura, 1977, 1989). In a self-efficacy analysis, a person will often choose to avoid tasks and environments as a self-protective act for guarding against the possibility of being overwhelmed by demands and challenges. If the student expects a math class or a foreign language class to be overwhelming, confusing, and frustrating, then doubt overwhelms effi- cacy and produces an avoidance decision, such as withdrawing from class discussions or not enrolling in the class in the first place. The same doubt-plagued avoidance choices apply to social opportunities, such as dating, dancing, participating in sports, selecting (or avoiding) a particular musical instrument, and career paths pursued and shunned.

Motivational Processes Underlying Cognitive Dissonance

People engage in all sorts of behaviors that imply that they are incompetent, immoral, or unreasonable. Inconsistency between what one believes (I am competent) and what one does (I acted incompetently) creates the cognitive inconsistency that is dissonance. In the face of dissonance-arousing situational events, like the four discussed above, however, dis- sonance arises and motivates change in ways of believing or behaving. An overview of the psychological processes underlying dissonance motivation and people's attempts to reduce or eliminate it appears in Figure 9.6 (Harmon-Jones & Mills, 1999).

Influential Occupations

People high in the need for power are attracted to occupations such as business exec- utives, teachers/professors, psychologists, journalists, clergy, and international diplomat. Each of these occupations shares a common denominator in that the per- son in the occupational role is in the position to direct the behavior of other people in accordance with some preconceived plan (Winter & Stewart, 1978). People in some of these professions speak to and influence audiences (teachers, journalists, clergy); others have inside information they use to influence people (psychologists, diplomats), while oth- ers have a professional status that allows them to tell others what to do (business execu- tives). Furthermore, these careers equip the individual with the rewards and punishments necessary for sanctioning the behavior of others. The teacher, cleric, diplomat, journalist, and business executive, for instance, all have the means for rewarding and punishing other people's compliance or disobedience (through grades, heavenly rewards, deal making, arti- cles, and salaries). Thus, people can involve and satisfy their power strivings through the job they choose.

Prestige Possessions

People high in the need for power tend to amass a collection of power symbols, or "prestige possessions". Power-seeking individuals are more likely to own a rifle or pistol, a convertible car, or a truck that exudes status and power.

Deliberative Mindset

People in a deliberative mindset think about what they would like to do — which desire is to be acted on, which goal is to be chosen, which need is to be prioritized, which preference is to be pursued, and which environmental incentive is to be acquired. What the person thinks about (the "mindset") revolves around questions such as how desirable one goal (or desire, need, preference, or incentive) is relative to another. The person asks, "Should I pursue my academic goals tonight, or should I pursue my social-relatedness needs tonight?" The key questions are, "What do I want?" or "What is the most desirable thing for me to do?" In addi- tion to desirability, the person deliberates, considers, and reflects upon how feasible each goal is. The key questions are, "Do I have what it takes to attain goal A, goal B, or goal C?", "How attainable are each of these goals?", and "Is goal A (or B, or C) worth the effort it will take to attain it?" This is a highly open-minded and deliberative process in which many options are considered and each option is worked through a cost and benefits analysis.

Choice

People often choose between alternatives. In some cases, the choice is easy, because the merits of one alternative far outweigh the merits of its rival. In other cases, the choice is not so easy, because both alternatives offer a number of advantages and disadvantages. Once such a difficult choice is made, people experience dissonance (or "post-decision regret"). Dissonance is resolved by appreciating the chosen alternative—viewing it more positively—and by depreciating the rejected alternative—viewing it more negatively (Brehm, 1956; Gilovich, Medvec, & Chen, 1995; Knox & Inkster, 1968; Younger, Walker, & Arrowood, 1977). To illustrate this process for yourself, simply ask a person both before and after making a difficult choice the following question: "How sure are you that your choice is the correct one?" Whether the choice involves deciding between restaurants, classes, or marriage partners, post-choice decision makers are invariably more confident in the wisdom of their choices than are those still in the decision-making process.

Thinking and Decision Making

People who believe strongly in their efficacy for solving problems remain remarkably effi- cient in their analytic thinking during stressful episodes, whereas people who doubt their problem-solving capacities think erratically (Bandura & Wood, 1989; Wood & Bandura, 1989), and show both confusion and negative thinking (Bandura, 1983; Wood & Bandura, 1989). To perform their best, people must first use memories of past events to predict the most effective course of action. They must also analyze feedback to assess and to reassess the merit of their plans and strategies. A strong sense of efficacy allows the performer to remain task focused, even in the face of situational stress and problem-solving dead ends. In contrast, self-doubt distracts decision makers away from such task-focused thinking because attention shifts to the deficiencies of the self and the overwhelming demands of the task. In short, doubt deteriorates, whereas efficacy buffers, the quality of a performer's thinking and decision making during a performance.

Leadership and Relationships

People with a high need for power seek recognition in groups and find ways for making themselves visible to others, apparently in an effort to establish influence. Power-seeking college students, for example, write more letters to the university newspaper, and power-seeking adults willingly take risks in achieving public visibility. They argue more frequently with their professors, and they show an eagerness in getting their points across in the classroom. In selecting their friends and coworkers, power-striving individuals generally prefer others who are in a position to be led. When hanging out with their friends, they tend to adopt an interpersonal orientation that takes on more of a tone of influence than it does a tone of intimacy.

What Achievement Strivings Predict

People with strong achievement strivings—that is, people in which Ts is greater than Taf—show relatively greater persistence on tasks of moderate difficulty, a preference to engage in moderately difficult tasks, greater attention and effort in these tasks, and better performance on moderately difficult tasks (Cooper, 1983; Pang, 2010). They tend to experience interest and satisfaction for attaining standards of excellence only when they seek achievement for its own sake; they do not derive intrinsic pleasure and satisfaction from attaining excellence that has been externally set or prescribed by others. High achievers also have a strong preference for those achievement tasks that offer concrete, direct, task-related, and immediate performance feedback, largely because they use such feedback as a means to make progress and to improve their future performances.

Discrepancy Reduction, Creation

Present state represents the person's current status of how life is going. The ideal state represents how the person wishes life was going. When the present state falls short of the hoped-for ideal state, a discrepancy is exposed. It is the discrepancy—rather than the ideal state per se—that has motivational properties. Discrepancy creates the sense of wanting to change the present state so that it will move closer and closer toward the ideal state. The motivational question is not so much "What is the ideal state?" as it is "How much of a discrepancy exists between my present vs. ideal states?" Small discrepancies carry little motivational punch, while large discrepancies carry much motivational punch.

The Conundrum of Choice

Providing a person with a choice may be the most obvious and widely used way to support a person's need for autonomy. There is a difference, however, between the environmental event of being offered a choice and the personal experience of true choice. Understanding this difference is an excellent way to understand the nature of the psychological need for autonomy. Providing choices to motivate others is a conundrum (a difficult and complicated problem to solve) because choice sometimes does but other times does not motivate others. Providing choices does generally enhance people's perceived autonomy and intrinsic motivation. However, not all choices are the same, and not all choices promote autonomy. Hence, the conundrum is, Does the provision of choice nurture autonomy and intrinsic motivation, or does it not? When people are allowed to make choices that truly reflect their personal values, goals, and interests, then they do feel a sense of need-satisfying autonomy. Such an experience of autonomy, in turn, leads to positive post-choice functioning in terms of enhanced intrinsic motivation, effort, creativity, preference for challenge, and performance. When offered in an informational way, people give choices to others with the intention of speaking to their preferences and personal goals (e.g., "What would you like to do?"). When offered in a controlling way, people give choices to others in ways that are actually intended to manipulate and control them (e.g., "You can choose to eat your vegetables or to sit here at the dinner table all night long.").

Corrective Motivation

Rather, incongruity gives rise to a more general "corrective motivation" (Campion & Lord, 1982). Corrective motivation activates a decision-making process in which the individual con- siders many different possible ways for reducing the present-ideal incongruity: change the plan, change behavior (increase effort), or withdraw from the plan altogether. That is, plan-directed behavior is a dynamic, flexible process in which corrective motivation ener- gizes the individual to pursue the most adaptive course. Hence, devising a good plan for removing or reducing incongruity is only the first half of the battle. Actually carrying out the an is the other half because people all too often encounter problems (e.g., situational con- straints, personal inadequacies) while trying to translate their plans into action. Corrective motivation is therefore a dynamic process of going back and forth between the two points listed above—act to achieve the ideal state but also be ready to revise an ineffective plan.

MINDSET 2: PROMOTION-PREVENTION

Regulatory focus theory proposes that people strive for their goals by using two separate and independent motivational orientations (i.e., mindsets): prevention and promotion (Higgins, 1997, 1998). The first motivational system is an improvement-based regu- latory style that involves a promotion focus, while the second motivational system is security-based regulatory style that involves a prevention focus. A promotion focus involves sensitivity to positive outcomes. The striving is to attain what one does not yet have. One strives to approach desired and ideal end states. A prevention focus involves sensitivity to negative outcomes. The striving is to maintain and not lose what one already has. One strives to maintain a sense of duty, obligation, and responsibility. A graphical representation of these two regulatory mindsets appears in Figure 9.2, with the promotion mindset summarized in the upper half of the figure and the prevention mindset summarized in the lower half of the figure. In both cases, the antecedents to adopt or develop the particular mindset appear on the left side of the figure, while its downstream consequences appear on the right side of the figure.

Relatedness

Relatedness is the psychological need to establish close emotional bonds and attachments with other people, and it reflects the desire to be emotionally connected to and interpersonally involved in warm relationships. Because we need relatedness, we gravitate toward people who we trust will care for our well-being, and we drift away from those who we do not trust to look out for our well-being. What people are essentially looking for within need-satisfying relationships is the opportunity to relate the self to another person in an authentic, caring, reciprocal, and emotionally meaningful way.

Self-Efficacy or the Psychological Need for Competence?

Self-efficacy and perceived competence (introduced in Chapter 6) are similar, but not the- oretically interchangeable, motivational constructs. While they can be experienced and measured in similar ways ("How competent do you feel during badminton?"), an example illustrates the difference between self-efficacy on the one hand and the psychological need for competence on the other. Imagine sitting on a bench at a playground when you see a young girl with a badminton bird, a racket, and a deep desire to bat the bird upwards time and time again (and not miss it). The sheer desire and intrinsic motivation to challenge herself for the spontaneous satisfactions the activity provides shows a proactive, challenge-seeking psychological need for competence. After a few hits, she will begin to reflect on how she is doing and formulate a judgment of her coping capacities and an expectation of how well she will do. If the wind begins to blow or if she improves her technique, then her effi- cacy judgment will change. The psychological need for competence, however, is more of a developmental constant and may very well motivate her to drop the racket to run over to the monkey bars to seek out and try to master a new challenge.

Sources of Self-Efficacy

Self-efficacy beliefs do not just occur out of the blue; they have causes and historical roots. Self-efficacy beliefs arise from (1) one's personal history in trying to execute that particular behavior or way of coping, (2) observations of similar others who also try to execute that behavior, (3) verbal persuasions (pep talks) from others, and (4) physiological states such as a racing versus a calm heart.

Learning, Coping, Performing, and Achieving

Self-efficacy beliefs predict people's learning, coping, performance, and achievement (Bandura, Barbaranelli, Caprara, & Pastorella, 2001; Ozer & Bandura, 1990; Pajares & Graham, 1999; Pietsch, Walker, & Chapman, 2003; Williams & Williams, 2010). The reason why self-efficacy facilitates learning, coping, performing, and achieving is because self-efficacy facilitates the type of active task involvement that is needed to increase and improve one's learning, coping, performing, and achieving—namely, approaching rather than avoiding challenges and opportunities, exerting greater rather than lesser effort, persisting in the face of obstacles rather than giving up, thinking clearly on what needs to be done rather than thinking erratically, negatively, and emotionally, and experiencing con- structive emotionality such as hope and interest rather than counterproductive emotionality such as fear and anxiety.

Skill and Self-Efficacy: Chicken or the Egg?

Self-efficacy beliefs rise and fall with changes in personal behavior history, vicarious expe- rience, verbal persuasion, and physiological state. These changes in self-efficacy, in turn, predict changes in skillful coping. But there is a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem within self-efficacy—namely, does skilled performance (e.g., personal behavior history) increase self-efficacy, does self-efficacy increase skilled performance, or do both of these effects occur? Skilled performance clearly predicts longitudinal changes in self-efficacy beliefs (Bandura, 1997), so the question is whether self-efficacy predicts longitudinal changes in skilled performance. While some research suggests that changes in self-efficacy cause later changes in skilled performance (Caprara, Barbaranelli, Steca, & Malone, 2006), other research shows that self-efficacy does not cause later changes in skilled performance (Stein & Wang, 1988), or does so only mildly (Holzberger, Philipp, & Kunter, 2013). The conclu- sion seems to be that both effects exist, although the effect that skilled performance has on self-efficacy is stronger than is the effect that self-efficacy has on skilled performance.

Fear and Anxiety

Social isolation and fear-arousing conditions are two situations that increase a person's desire to affiliate with others. Under conditions of isolation and fear, people report being jittery and tense, feeling as if they are suffering and are in pain, and seeing themselves as going to pieces. To reduce such anxiety and fear, humans typically adopt the strategy of seeking out others. When afraid, people desire to affiliate for emotional support and to see how others handle the emotions they feel from the fear object. For example, imagine camping out in the wilder- ness and hearing a sudden, loud noise in the middle of the night. The sudden, unexplained noise might produce fear. While feeling fear and anxiety, people seek out others, partly to see if others seem as afraid and partly to gain emotional and physical support. Having other people around while anxious is comforting, and it helps us clarify the threatening situation, identify possible coping strategies, and help carry out our coping attempts. The popularity of mutual support groups (e.g., people with alcoholism, unwed mothers, patients suffering a particular illness, and people facing particular adjustment problems) provides some confirming testimony to the human tendency to seek out others when one is afraid or anxious.

Helplessness and Depression

Some clinical psychologists view learned helplessness as a model of naturally occurring unipolar depression (Rosenhan & Seligman, 1984; Seligman, 1975). Learned helpless- ness and depression are similar in that the same expectations cause both: The individual expects that bad events will occur, and there is nothing she can do to prevent their occur- rence (Rosenhan & Seligman, 1984). Learned helplessness and depression also share com- mon symptoms (passivity, low self-esteem, loss of appetite) and therapeutic intervention strategies (time, cognitive behavior modification). Using the learned helplessness model to understand the etiology of unipolar depression touched off a flurry of research that brought both strong criticism (Costello, 1978; Depue & Monroe, 1978) and strong support (Seligman, 1975). One of the most exciting findings to emerge is that depressed individuals sometimes see the events in their lives as less control- lable than do individuals who are not depressed. Such a finding led researchers to wonder whether the depressive tendency of individuals to see their worlds as uncontrollable might be the core cause of unipolar depression. Perhaps the root of depression lies in a depressed individual's inability to recognize that he has more control over his life outcomes than he knows. If so, the therapy recommendation would be clear-namely, increase the person's perceived control beliefs.

Fixed Mindset

Some people believe that their personal qualities are fixed attributes. They believe that they (and others) are endowed with fixed, set qualities. The thinking is "you either have it, or you don't" in that some people are smart, or creative, or good in mathematics while other people are not. People who hold a fixed mindset are sometimes referred to as "entity theorists," because they believe that there is a physical entity that dwells inside the person (e.g., a good brain, a creative gene) to determine how much of the personality quality a person has. When people adopt a fixed mindset, they have the sense that if they have a lot of the fixed quality then they are in good shape. For instance, if a person believes that she has a gift for languages, then she will expect to do well in a foreign language class at school. She also believes, however, that if she has little of the fixed personal quality, then she is in bad shape. For instance, she may believe that she lacks athletic genes and therefore expect to do poorly when invited to play a game of basketball.

Getting Started

Some people exercise every day at a certain time in the afternoon; some people read steadily and persistently when in the library; and some people always stop completely at stop signs. Frequent and consistent pairings of particular situations with particular behaviors lead to strong links between the situation and the behavior. When goal striving is not part of one's routine, however, it is easy to forget to take action. People with good intentions often for- get to take their vitamins, forget to send thank-you notes, and forget to work on a project, as in "I had all day to read the chapter, but I just never sat down and read it." In contrast, implementation intentions set up environment-behavior contingencies that lead to automatic, environmentally cued behavior. When the situational cue presents itself (e.g., 7:00 in the morning), the person has a ready-to-go reminder to take her daily vitamin.

Acknowledging and Accepting Expressions of Negative Affect

Sometimes people complain, show resistance, and express negative affect about having to engage in uninteresting or difficult tasks. They sometimes show "attitude" when having to do things like clean their rooms, follow rules, run laps, and be nice. People who adopt an autonomy-supportive style listen carefully to these expressions of negative affect and accept them as valid reactions to being asked to do things that seems, to them, uninteresting and not worthwhile. Essentially, autonomy-supportive individuals say "okay," and then work collaboratively with the other person to solve the underlying cause of the negative affect and resistance, usually with the end result of redesigning the uninteresting activity into something that becomes more interesting or appealing to the person. People who adopt a controlling style make it clear that such expressions of negative affect and resistance are unacceptable, saying things such as, "Quit your complaining and just get the work done — or else!" and "It's my way or the highway."

Socialization Influences

Strong and resilient achievement strivings arise, in part, from socialization influences. Children develop relatively strong achievement strivings when their parents provide the following: independence training (e.g., self-reliance), high performance aspirations, realistic standards of excellence, high ability self-concepts (e.g., "This task will be easy for you"), a positive valuing of achievement-related pursuits, explicit standards for excellence, a home environment rich in stimulation potential (e.g., books to read), a wide scope of experiences such as traveling, and exposure to children's readers rich in achievement imagery (e.g., The Little Engine That Could; deCharms & Moeller, 1962). After years of investigation, the effort to identify the childhood socialization practices of high-need achievers was only partly successful, however, largely because longitudinal findings began to show that achievement strivings change a great deal from childhood to adulthood and that adult achievement strivings often changed from one decade to the next.

Benefits of Mastery Goals

The benefits of adopting a mastery, rather than a performance, goal are illustrated in Figure 9.4. When people adopt mastery goals, compared to when they adopt performance goals, they tend to (1) prefer challenging tasks that they can learn from rather than easy tasks on which they can demonstrate high ability (Ames & Archer, 1988; Elliot & Dweck, 1988), (2) use conceptually based learning strategies such as relating information to existing knowledge rather than superficial learning strategies such as memorizing (Meece, Blumenfeld, & Hoyle, 1988; Nolen, 1988), (3) are more likely to be intrinsically rather than extrinsically motivated (Heyman & Dweck, 1992), and (4) are more likely to ask for help and information from others that will allow them to continue working on their own (Newman, 1991). These adaptive strategies allow those with mastery goals to work harder (increase effort in the face of difficulty rather than turn passive or quit; Elliot & Dweck, 1988), persist longer (Elliot & Dweck, 1988), and perform better (Spence & Helmreich, 1983).

Origins of the Need for Achievement

What all types of achievement situations have in common is that the person has encoun- tered a standard of excellence and has been energized by it, largely because he or she knows that the forthcoming performance will produce an emotionally meaningful evaluation of personal competence. A "standard of excellence" needs to be defined broadly to include not only meeting an explicit standard of excellence as determined by others (one's teacher, a sales quota, and qualifying time to make the Olympic games), because it also includes attaining a personal best and even a subjective experience that one indeed did rise to a chal- lenge. That said, there are only two outcomes that follow a competition with a standard of excellence: success or failure (Pang, 2010)

Benefits of Giving and Receiving Autonomy Support

The benefits of both giving and receiving autonomy support can be illustrated by thinking about the quality of the relationship you have with several different people in your life. Imagine a close friend and complete the following questions: • My friend believes that I provide him/her with choices and options (giving autonomy support). • My friend tries to understand how I seet hings (receiving autonomy support). • When I am with my friend, I feel free to be who I am (autonomy) • When I am with my friend, I feel like a competent person (competence). • When I am with my friend, I feel loved and cared about (relatedness). After completing these questions, ask yourself about the quality of that relationship in terms of relationship satisfaction, closeness, and felt security (versus dismissive, fearful, alienated, and inability to turn to the friend in a time of need). When researchers examined peer relationships, they found that the more one person received autonomy support from the other and the more one person gave autonomy support to the other, the more those in the relationship experience psychological need satisfaction. Further, the more autonomy, competence, and relatedness need satisfaction that relationship was able to produce, the better able was that relationship to produce relationship satisfaction, positive affect, emo- tional closeness, and felt security, and this was just as true for male friendships as it was for female.

Integrating Classical and Contemporary Approaches to Achievement Motivation

The classical (Atkinson's theory; Chapter 7) and contemporary (achievement goals) approaches to achievement motivation can be combined and integrated into a single comprehensive model (Elliot, 1997). In the integrated model, mastery goals and two differ- ent types of achievement performance goals exist: performance-approach and performance- avoidance. The classical achievement motivation constructs (achievement motivation, fear of failure, competence beliefs) serve as general, personality-like antecedent conditions that influence the specific type of goals the person adopts in a given achievement setting. For instance, as shown in Figure 9.5, people high in the dispositional need for achievement tend to adopt performance-approach goals, people high in the dispositional fear of failure tend to adopt performance-avoidance goals, and people with task-specific high competency expectancies tend to adopt mastery goals.

Tote model

The cognitive mechanism by which plans energize and direct behavior is the test-operate-test-exit (TOTE) model, as illustrated in Figure 8.1 (Miller et al., 1960). Test means to compare the present state against the ideal. If the present state and the ideal state are the same (are congruous), nothing happens. A mismatch between the two (incongruity), however, springs the individual into action. That is, the mismatch motivates the individual to operate on the environment via a planned sequence of action. That is, when you look in the mirror to check if your hair looks okay, you "test" or compare the way your hair presently looks in the mirror against the way you want your hair ideally to look. If your hair looks okay, you say "fine" and walk away from the mirror. But if you see a mismatch between your present hair and your ideal hair, then it is time to "operate" via a plan of action—you comb your hair, take a shower, use hairspray, or just wear a hat. After a period of action, the person again tests the present state against the ideal. If the feedback reveals that the incongruity continues to persist, then the person continues to operate on the environment (T-O-T-O-T-O, and so on).

Plans of action

The contemporary cognitive study of motivation began in 1960 when a trio of psychologists—George Miller, Eugene Galanter, and Karl Pribram—investigated how plans motivate behavior. According to these pioneers, people have mental representations of the ideal states of their behavior, environmental objects, and events. In other words, people have in mind what an ideal tennis serve looks like (ideal behavior), what an ideal birthday gift would be (ideal environmental object), and what constitutes an ideal night on the town (ideal event). People are also aware of the present state of their behavior, environment, and events. That is, people have the knowledge of their current tennis serve (present behavior), gift (present object), and evening itinerary (present event). Any mismatch perceived between one's present state and one's ideal state instigates an experience of "incongruity," which has motivational properties. Suffering incongruity, people formulate a plan of action to remove that incongruity (Miller et al., 1960; Newell, Shaw, & Simon, 1958; Powers, 1973). Hence, the essential motivational process underlying a plan is as follows: People have knowledge of both their present and ideal states and any perceived incongruity between the two makes people uncomfortable enough to formulate and act on a plan of action to remove the incongruity so that the present state will change and transform into the ideal state. The incongruity is the motivational "spring to action," and the plan directs behavior toward the pursuit of the ideal state.

Communal and Exchange Relationships

The distinction between communal and exchange relationships captures the essence of relationships that do (communal) and do not (exchange) satisfy the relatedness need. What distinguishes exchange from communal relationships are the implicit rules that guide the giving and receiving of benefits, such as money, help, and emotional support.

Dynamics-of-Action Model

The dynamics-of-action model extends Atkinson's episodic view to also explain and predict changes in achievement strivings and behavior over time. In the dynamics-of-action model, achievement behavior occurs within a stream of ongoing behavior. The stream of behavior is determined largely by three forces: instigation, inhibition, and consummation. Instigation is the amount of motivation to do something. Inhibition is the amount of motivation not to do something. The consummatory force decreases the motivation to continue to engage in an ongoing behavior; it is the motivation to stop and take a rest.

Applications to Humans

The early experiments on learned helplessness used animals as research participants mostly because the uncontrollable events used in these studies included traumatic events, such as electric shock. Later studies found ways to test the extent to which helplessness applied to humans (Diener & Dweck, 1978, 1980; Dweck, 1975; Hiroto, 1974; Hiroto & Seligman, 1975; Mikulincer, 1994; Peterson et al., 1993). In Donald Hiroto's (1974) experiment, irri- tating noise constituted the aversive, traumatic stimulus event. The results with humans paralleled the results with dogs (see Table 10.2) in that participants in the inescapable noise group sat passively and were unwilling to attempt an escape from the noise, whereas partici- pants in the escapable and no-noise groups learned quickly to escape the noise (by operating a lever). Humans too learned helplessness.

Personal Behavior History

The extent to which a person believes she can competently enact a particular course of action stems from her personal history of trying to enact that course of action in the past (Bandura, 1986, 1997; Bandura, Reese, & Adams, 1982). People learn their current self-efficacy from their interpretations and memories of past attempts to execute the same behavior. Mem- ories and recollections of past attempts to enact the behavior judged as competent raise self-efficacy, whereas memories and recollections of past attempts judged as incompetent lower self-efficacy. For instance, as a child prepares to ride a bicycle, her personal his- tory of being able to actually carry out the cycling behavior on past occasions functions as firsthand information about self-efficacy in the present encounter. Of course, a person's behavior history with regard to any specific course of action changes a bit with each new enactment. How important any one behavioral enactment is to future efficacy depends on the strength of the performer's preexisting expectation. Once one's personal behavior his- tory has produced a strong sense of efficacy, an occasional incompetent enactment will not lower self-efficacy much (or an occasional competent enactment will not raise a strong sense of inefficacy much). If the performer is less experienced (i.e., lacks a behavioral his- tory), however, each new competent or incompetent enactment will inform future efficacy. This is a very important point in teaching situations in which learners are trying out new behaviors and new activities. Of the four sources of self-efficacy, personal behavior history is the most influential (Bandura, 1986).

Tendency to Approach Success

The first variable in the equation, Ms, corresponds to the person's need for achievement. The variable Ps is estimated from the perceived difficulty of the task and from the person's perceived ability at that task. The variable Is is equal to 1 − Ps. Therefore, if the probability of success is .25, the incentive for success at that task would be .75 (1.00 − 0.25). That is, incentive value for success during difficult tasks is high whereas it is low during easy tasks. To make sense of the behavioral tendency to approach success (Ts), consider a high school wrestler who is scheduled to wrestle two different opponents this week. The first opponent is last year's state champion (Ps = .1), so he consequently has a strong incentive to beat the champ (Is = 1 − Ps, which = .9). The second opponent is his equal (Ps = .5) so he consequently has a moderate incentive to succeed (Is = .5). If we use an arbitrary number like 10 to characterize the wrestler's dispositional need for achievement (Ms), Atkinson's theory predicts the wrestler will experience the greater achievement motivation for the second wrestler (Ts = 2.50, because 10 × .5 × .5 = 2.50) than for the first wrestler (Ts = 0.90, because 10 × .1 × .9 = 0.90), because optimal challenge (Ps = .5) provides the richest motivational combination of expectancy of success and incentive for success.

Motivation to Exercise Personal Control

The focus throughout this chapter is the motivation to exercise personal control over what does and does not happen to you. To some extent, environments are both predictable and responsive to our control attempts. Because this is so, people are often able to figure out what they need to do to exert control over the environment and life's outcomes. The strength with which people try to exercise personal control can be traced to the strengths of their expectancies of being able to do so. Expectancy is a subjective prediction of how likely it is that an event will occur. That event can be an outcome (e.g., losing 10 pounds) or a course of action that brings the outcome to pass (e.g., running 20 minutes on a treadmill without having a heart attack). For instance, when politicians enter an election or athletes enter a competition, they appraise the likelihood that they will win. Before people leap across a creek or tell a risqué joke, they appraise the likelihood of landing on solid ground. In anticipating events and outcomes, people rely on their past experiences and personal resources to make forecasts—expectancies—about what the future holds and how well they will be able to cope with what is to come.

Fruits of Relatedness Need Satisfaction

The fruits of relatedness need satisfaction are the fruits of any psychological need satisfaction- namely, engagement, developmental growth, health, and well-being. In terms of engagement, it is a routine finding in the school setting that relatedness to one's teachers, relatedness to one's peers, and relatedness to one's family and community are strong and reliable predictors of students' engagement, including how much effort they put forth during school and whether they persist in school versus drop out.

MINDSET 3: GROWTH-FIXED

The growth-fixed mindset concerns the question of how people think about their personal qualities, such as their intelligence and personality traits. Generally speaking, the way peo- ple think about their personal qualities can be characterized in one of two ways (Dweck, 1999, 2006). Some people see personal qualities as fixed and enduring characteristics. The thinking is you are either smart or dumb, an extravert or an introvert, and that is that (i.e., the personal quality is fixed and set). Other people, in contrast, see personal qualities as mal- leable characteristics that can be increased with effort. You may be dumb or introverted, but you can become smarter or more extraverted with experience, training, effort, practice, and strategic thinking (i.e., the personal quality is malleable and can be changed).

Optimistic Explanatory Style

The illusion of control is an attributional phenomenon that, over time, fosters an optimistic explanatory style. People with an optimistic explanatory style tend to take substantial credit for their successes but accept little or no blame for their failures (e.g., "It's not my fault that I am unemployed, divorced, broke, and had a car accident last month. I am, however, respon- sible for my team winning the softball game last night."). As you might expect, depressed individuals rarely have an optimistic style and do not show an illusion of control (Alloy & Abramson, 1979, 1982).

psychological needs

When an activity taps into and involves our psychological needs, we feel interest. Interest is the emotion that signals that one's inner psychological needs have been involved by the activity at hand. When an activity satisfies our psychological needs, we feel enjoyment. Enjoyment is the emotion that signals that one's inner psychological needs have been satisfied by the activity at hand. Psychological needs are an important addition to the larger analysis of motivated behavior Psychological needs are of a qualitatively different nature. Energy generated by psychological needs is proactive. Psychological needs promote a proactive willingness to seek out and to engage in an environment that we expect will be able to nurture our psychological needs. Because psychological needs motivate exploration and challenge-seeking, they are understood as growth (rather than as deficit) needs.

Downstream Consequences of the Deliberative versus Implemental Stereotype and Mindsets

The important point to emphasize in making a distinction between the deliberative versus implemental mindset is the following: The implemental mindset is more conducive to goal striving than is the deliberative mindset. When people are in an implemental rather than a deliberative mindset, they persist longer and perform better. This is so is because these two mindsets produce different downstream consequences. To study the downstream consequences of the deliberative versus implemental mindsets, researchers experimentally induced one mindset or the other in participants. To induce a deliberative mindset, participants first identify a goal or personal striving that they are currently considering but have not yet decided on or committed to (e.g., "I'm considering switching my major, but I haven't yet decided whether to change majors or to just stay with this one."). Participants then make a "pros and cons" list of the potential benefits and costs of each possible goal or striving. They also are asked to estimate the probability that these benefits and costs will actually materialize if each goal is or is not pursued. To induce an implemental mindset, participants first identify a goal or striving that they plan to accomplish during a specific period of time (e.g., "By the end of the semester, I will have written my term paper, revised it, and submitted it for a grade.").

Atkinson's Model

The initial effort to understand achievement motivation was led by John Atkinson's expectancy x value model of achievement behavior, which includes the dynamics-of-action model. Atkinson represented achievement striving and behavior as an inherent struggle of approach versus avoidance. All of us experience standards of excellence as a two-edged sword: Partly we feel excitement and hope and anticipate the pride of a job well done; partly we feel anxiety and fear and anticipate the shame of possible humiliation. Thus, achievement motivation exists as a balance between the emotions and beliefs underlying the tendency to approach success versus the emotions and beliefs underlying the tendency to avoid failure. John Atkinson (1957, 1964) argued that the need for achievement only partly predicts achievement behavior. Achievement behavior depends not only on the individual's dispo- sitional, implicit achievement strivings but also on his or her task-specific probability of success and the incentive for succeeding at that task. For Atkinson, some tasks had high probabilities for success, whereas others had low probabilities for success. Also, some tasks offered greater incentive for success than did others. Atkinson's theory features four variables: achievement behavior and its three predictors—need for achievement, probability of success, and incentive for success. Achievement behavior is defined as the tendency to approach success, abbreviated as Ts. The three determining factors of Ts are (1) the strength of a person's need for achievement (Ms, motive to succeed), (2) the perceived probability of success (Ps), and (3) the incentive value of success (Is). Atkinson's model is expressed in the following formula: Ts = Ms × Ps × Is

Alternative Explanations

The learned helplessness model is not without its critics (Costello, 1978; Weiss, Glazer, & Pohorecky, 1976; Wortman & Brehm, 1975). The central question under debate is just what causes helplessness. In the learned helplessness model, helplessness follows from a cognitive event, namely the expectation of a response → outcome independence (recall Figure 10.4). But, learned helplessness experiments induce participants with trauma, and it could be that traumatic events themselves (e.g., shocks, noise blasts, unsolvable problems) induce helplessness. Through clever and sophisticated research designs (i.e., triadic design with a yoking procedure), researchers found that it was indeed the learned expectation, not the trauma itself, that produces helplessness (Weiss, 1972). Other researchers argue that the expectation of failure, rather than the expectation of uncontrollability per se, induces helplessness. But investigators' clever research designs showed that failure, more often than not, actually produces a positive motivation (a phe- nomenon discussed in the next section under "Reactance Theory") and that it is the expec- tation of uncontrollability, not the expectation of failure, that causes learned helplessness deficits (Winefield, Barnett, & Tiggemann, 1985).

Organismic Psychological Needs

The motivational source of that inherent activity is somewhat complex but essentially involves the person's psychological needs, intrinsic motivation, interests and personal goals, and self-endorsed values.

Achievement

The need for achievement is the desire to do well relative to a standard of excellence. It is the individual's unconscious, but frequently recurring, preference to feel positive affect upon improving his or her performance, making progress on a challenging task, and experiencing "success in competition with a standard of excellence". A standard of excellence is any challenge to a person's sense of competence that ends with an objective outcome of success versus failure, win versus lose, or right versus wrong. Competition with a standard of excellence is a broad term that encompasses: competition with a task (e.g., solving a puzzle), competition with the self (e.g., running a race in a personal best time), and competition against others (e.g., becoming the class valedictorian).

The Duality of Affiliation Motives

The need for affiliation has its dark side, because it seems to be mostly about a fear of rejection. It is the anxious need to establish, maintain, and restore interpersonal relations (affiliation need). The need for intimacy has its light side, because it seems to be mostly about an attraction to warm, close relationships. It is the need to engage in warm, close, positive relations (intimacy need). The full picture of affiliation strivings includes a theoretical conceptualization that includes both its positive and negative aspects.

Prevention Mindset

The prevention regulatory focus centers on responsibility and duty. With a prevention focus, the individual is sensitive to negative outcomes, avoids possibilities of loss, and adopts a vigilant behavioral strategy of caution that might be characterized as "do the right thing." The concern is with safety, security, and responsibility as the person strives to prevent failing to do one's duty, meet one's obligations, and fulfill one's responsibilities. It means being careful to make sure that bad things do not happen. For instance, the person seeks safety and security, to not fail, to not lose money, and to stay in touch and in close contact with friends. When oughts are maintained, the emotional experience is one of being relaxed and feeling calm, but when these ought obligations are lost, the emotional experience is one of being anxious, including feeling agitated, uneasy, afraid, and threatened.

Regulatory Fit Predicts Strength of Motivation and Well-Being

The previous section highlights the importance of regulatory fit, which means that deci- sions and behaviors feel right when people rely on goal striving means that fit their mindset (i.e., promotion versus prevention mindset; Higgins, 2000, 2005). This sense that some- thing feels right means that one's goal and strategies are matched (promotion matches with eager locomotion; prevention matches with cautious vigilance). Regulatory fit also pro- duces increased motivational strength (Forster, Higgins, & Idson, 1998). That is, people with a promotion focus exert more effort, feel more alert, value the experience more, and actually cope and perform better when they strive with eagerness rather than with vigilance, while people with a prevention focus exert more effort, feel more alert, value the experience more, and cope and perform better when they strive with vigilance rather than with eager- ness (Higgins, 2000, 2006; Keller & Bless, 2006). Regulatory fit also contributes positively to psychological well-being because it leads people to feelings of interest, enjoyment, and satisfaction with what they are doing, whereas regulatory misfit interferes with and blocks feelings of interest, enjoyment, and satisfaction with what they are doing.

Involving Relatedness: Interaction with Others

The primary condition that involves the relatedness need is social interaction. When we are alone, our relatedness need is relatively quiet. It is social interaction that vitalizes the psychological need for relatedness. So, it is only those social interactions that promise the possibility of warmth, care, and mutual concern that vitalize the relatedness need.

Conditions that Involve the Affiliation and Intimacy Duality

The principal condition that involves the need for affiliation is the deprivation from social interaction. Conditions such as loneliness, rejection, and separation raise people's desire, or need, to be with others. Hence, the need for affiliation expresses itself as a deficiency-oriented motive (the deficiency is a lack of social interaction). In contrast, the desire, or need, for intimacy arises from interpersonal caring and concern, warmth and commitment, emotional connectedness, reciprocal dialogue, congeniality, and love. The need for intimacy expresses itself as a growth-oriented motive (the growth opportunity is enriching one's relationships). In the words of Abraham Maslow (1987), the need for affiliation revolves around "deprivation-love," whereas the need for intimacy revolves around "being-love."

Promotion Mindset

The promotion regulatory focus centers on the possibility of advancement. With a promo- tion focus, the individual is sensitive to positive outcomes, approaches possibilities of gain, and adopts an eager behavioral strategy of locomotion that might be characterized as "just do it." The concern is with growth, advancement, and accomplishment as the person strives to advance from a neutral state to one of accomplishing a desire, a wish, or an ideal. It means making good things happen. For instance, the person seeks to graduate, develop a new skill, earn extra money, and be supportive of friends. When ideals are realized, the emotional experience is one of being cheerful, including feeling happy and satisfied, but when these sought-after ideals are left unrealized, the emotional experience is one of being dejected, including feeling disappointed, dissatisfied, and sad.

Organismic Approach to Motivation

The three psychological needs of autonomy, competence, and relatedness are organismic psychological needs. Organismic theories of motivation get their name from the term organism, an entity that is alive and in active exchange with its environment. The well-being of any organism depends on its environment because the environment offers the resources the organism needs to be well, such as food, water, social support, and intellectual stimulation. Organisms also need environmental resources to grow and to actualize their latent potentials. When environments are supportive and provide what is needed, organisms thrive; when environments are hostile and withhold what is needed, organisms suffer. Overall, the focus is on how organisms initiate interactions with the environment, how environments change, and how organisms learn, adapt, change, and grow as a function of those environmental transactions.

Structure

The upper part of Figure 6.5 introduces the interesting idea that environments can be structured to make a flow experience more likely. That is, if the environment provided by teachers, workplace managers, athletic coaches, and so on can be structured to offer both clear goals and clear feedback, then these are the conditions that create both competence psychological need satisfaction and flow. This is generally true, but just offering clear goals and clear feedback has been found to be missing a key piece of the puzzle in helping others experience enjoyment, flow, and competence need satisfaction. People also need skill-building guidance and help. They need optimal challenge, but they also need instruction, coaching, and guidance so that they can figure out how to meet and master that optimal challenge. This context of clear goals, guidance and help, and clear feedback represents "structure"

Conditions that Involve and Satisfy the Need for Achievement

Three situations involve and satisfy the need for achievement: moderately difficult tasks, competition, and entrepreneurship.

Satisfying Relatedness: Perception of a Social Bond

To be satisfying, that social bond needs to be characterized by the perceptions that the other person (1) cares about my welfare and (2) likes me. But more than caring and liking, the relationships that deeply satisfy the need for relatedness are those steeped in the knowledge that one's "true self"—one's "authentic self"—has been shown and deemed to be important in the eyes of another person. Relationships that do not involve caring, liking, accepting, and valuing do not satisfy the need for relatedness. People who are lonely, for instance, do not lack frequent social contact, and they do not attend less to others. They interact with others, and they notice the changes in facial expression and voice tone as much as do nonlonely people. Rather, those who feel lonely lack close, intimate relationships.

Growth Mindset

When people adopt a growth mindset, they have the sense that the more effort they put in, the more they will learn, grow, and develop and the better or higher will be their personal qualities. People with a growth mindset realize that people may start a developmental task with different amounts of the personal quality (intelligence, talent), but they believe that the extent to which they invest effort in the processes of learning, practicing, and training, then they will eventually end up with greater intelligence or greater talent and also that gains in these personal qualities will be explained by the hours and years of learning, practicing, and training invested in the developmental effort.

The Pleasure of Optimal Challenge

To confirm that people do indeed derive pleasure and a sense of personal satisfaction from optimal challenge, Susan Harter gave school age children anagrams of different difficulty levels and monitored each child's expressed pleasure (through smiling) upon solving each anagram. (An anagram is a word or phrase such as table, with its letters rearranged to form another word or phrase, as in bleat.) In general, solving anagrams successfully produced greater smiling and higher enjoyment than did failure, suggesting that mastery in general gratifies the competence need. In addition, however, some anagrams were very easy (three letters), some were easy (four letters), others were moderately difficult (five letters), and still others were very hard (six letters). As the anagrams increased in difficulty, it took the children longer and longer to solve them, as you might expect, but the critical measure in the study was how much the children smiled after solving the anagrams of different levels of difficulty. A curvilinear inverted-U pattern emerged in which children smiled very little after solving the very easy or easy problems, very much after solving the moderately difficult problems, and only modestly after solving the very hard problems. The central point is that children experience the greatest pleasure following success in the context of optimal (moderate) challenge. In the words of the children, "The fives were just right; they were a challenge, but not too much challenge" and "I liked the hard ones because they gave you a sense of satisfaction, but the really hard ones were just too frustrating".

Establishing Interpersonal Networks

To form new friendships, people with a high need for intimacy typically spend time inter- acting with others, join social groups, and establish stable and long-lasting relationships. As relationships develop, high-need intimacy individuals come to know more personal information and history about their friends. And they report being more and more satisfied as their relationships progress, whereas individuals with a low need for intimacy report being less and less satisfied with their developing relationships. Individuals with a high need for intimacy perceive the tightening bonds of friendship as need involving and as emotionally satisfying, whereas those with a low-need intimacy perceive the tightening bonds of friendship as stifling and as an entrapment.

Empowerment

Two practical points about self-efficacy are important to highlight. First, self-efficacy beliefs come from personal behavior history, vicarious experiences, verbal persuasion, and phys- iological states (e.g., Figure 10.3). What makes this a practical point is that it means high self-efficacy beliefs can be acquired and changed. Second, the level of self-efficacy predicts ways of coping that can be called "competent functioning" or "personal empowerment."

Two Types of Discrepancy

Two types of discrepancies exist. The first is discrepancy reduction, which is based on the discrepancy-detecting feedback that under- lies plans of action and corrective motivation. Some aspect of the environment (e.g., a boss, scholarship opportunity, athletic opponent, a stopwatch) provides feedback about how well or how poorly current performance matches up with its ideal level. For instance, at work, the supervisor might tell the salesperson that 10 sales are not enough; 15 sales are needed. Likewise, a student might read in a brochure that his current 2.0 GPA is not enough for scholarship eligibility; a GPA of 3.0 is needed. In essence, the environment brings some standard of excellence (an ideal state) to the person's awareness and asks, essentially, "Are you currently performing at this desired level?" The second type of discrepancy is discrepancy creation. Discrepancy creation is based on a "feed-forward" system in which the person looks forward and sets a future, higher goal. The person deliberately and proactively sets a higher goal—an ideal state that does not yet exist except in the performer's mind—and does not require feedback from a boss or a scholarship to impose it. For instance, the salesperson might, for whatever reason, decide to try for 15 sales in one week instead of the usual 10, and the student might decide to try for a 3.0 GPA. Thus, the person creates for him- or herself a new, higher goal to pursue.

Two Kinds of Expectancy

Two types of expectancies exist: efficacy expectations and outcome expectations. An efficacy expectation is a judgment of one's capacity to execute a particular act or course of action. The question is, "Can I do it?" An outcome expectation (see Figure 10.1) is a judgment that a given action, once performed, will cause a particular outcome. The question is, "Will it work?" Efficacy expectations estimate the likelihood that an individual can behave in a particular way; outcome expectations estimate how likely it is that certain consequences will follow once that behavior is enacted. For an illustration of these two kinds of expectancy, consider the political candidate who wants to win an election and believes that by giving a convention speech she can win. Efficacy expectations pertain to her confidence that she can "do what it takes" to give a competent speech. Outcome expectancies pertain to her beliefs that once she gives her competent speech, the speech will produce positive outcomes—people will listen, be persuaded by her oratory, and vote for her in the election.

Vicarious Experience

Vicarious experience involves observing a model enact the same course of action the per- former is about to enact (e.g., "You go first, I'll watch"). Seeing others perform masterfully raises an observer's own sense of efficacy (Bandura, Adams, Hardy, & Howells, 1980; Kazdin, 1979). This is so because seeing similar others perform the same behavior initiates a social comparison process (e.g., "If they can do it, so can I"). But vicarious experience works the other way as well, because observing others perform the same behavior clumsily lowers our own sense of efficacy (e.g., "If they can't do it, what makes me think I can?"; Brown & Inouye, 1978). The extent to which a model's enactment affects our own efficacy depends on two factors. First, the greater the similarity between the model and the observer, the greater the impact the model's behavior will have on the observer's efficacy forecast (Schunk, 1989b). Second, the less experienced the observer is at the behavior (a novice), the greater the impact of the vicarious experience (Schunk, 1989a). Thus, vicarious experi- ence is a potent source of efficacy for relatively inexperienced observers who watch similar others perform.

Well-Being

Well-being refers generally to positive mental health and more specifically to the presence of positive emotionality, the absence of negative emotionality, having a sense of meaning or purpose, and being satisfied with one's life. Well-being is the telltale sign of person-environment synthesis, just as ill-being is the telltale sign of person-environment conflict. People who have their psychological needs supported are happier than people who have their psychological needs neglected or frustrated, and the same person is happier on days in which his or her psychological needs are satisfied versus those days when his or her needs are neglected or frustrated.

Optimal Challenge

When skill out- weighs challenge (skill is high, challenge is low; lower right quadrant of both figures), task engagement is characterized by reduced concentration, minimal task involvement, and emotional boredom. Being underchallenged neglects competence, and that neglect manifests itself emotionally as indifference or boredom. The worst profile of experience emanates from the pairing of low challenge and low skill (the lower left quadrant in both figures). With both challenge and skill low, literally all measures of emotion, motivation, and cognition are at their lowest levels—the person simply does not care about the task. Flow is therefore a bit more complicated than just the balance of challenge and skill because balancing low skill and low challenge produces apathy. A more accurate description of how challenge relates to skill is that flow emerges in those situations in which both challenge and skill are high or moderately high. This is important because the main problem with optimal challenge, motivationally speaking, is that people who pursue optimal challenges are as likely to experience failure and frustration as they are to experience success and enjoyment.

Nurturing Inner Motivational Resources

When teachers place learning activities in front of their students and when employers assign work to their employees, how do they try to spark their students' and employees' initiative, enthusiasm, and motivation to engage themselves productively in the work? People with an autonomy-supportive motivating style seek to vitalize the other person's inner motivational resources. They will present the work to be done so that it is consistent with the other per- son's interests, preferences, values, personal goals, sense of challenge, and psychological needs. Before presenting the work to the other, they will ask the other, "How can I make this task more interesting? How can I revise this task so that it is personally important to you? How can I restructure the task so that it becomes a more need-satisfying thing to do?" People with a controlling motivating style ignore or discount the other person's inner motivational resources and instead just tell the other what do to. To motivate the other to do what he is told to do, they will offer some environmental source of motivation, such as an incentive, reward, deadline, command, or threat of punishment. By adding the extrinsic motivator, the idea is not to support autonomy but rather to pressure the person into compliance.

Feedback

Whether individuals perceive their performance to be competent or incompetent is often an ambiguous undertaking. To make such an evaluation, a performer needs feedback. Feedback comes from one (or more) of the following four sources: - Task its self - Comparisons of ones current performance with ones own past performances - Comparisons of ones current performance with the performance of others - Evaluations of others Post-performance praise is fine, but in-performance mentoring that enhances skill is the type of feedback that translates into an authentic experience of competence need satisfaction.

Explicit motives

are people's con- scious, readily accessible, and verbally stated motivations. For instance, if someone asked you, "Do you have a strong need for achievement?" "Do you love challenges?" and "Will you persist in the face of failure?" the answers to these questions represent explicit achieve- ment motivation. Explicit motives are assessed with self-report questionnaires. Implicit motives for achievement are different, as they are based on your emotional reactions during a challenging task and whether you really emotionally want to persist in the face of fail- ure.

Exchange relationships

are those between acquaintances or between people who do business together. In exchange relationships, no obligation exists between interactants to be concerned with the other person's needs or welfare. As they say in the movie The Godfather, "It's business." (Incidentally, an "It's business" attitude toward a relationship serves to justify why people act in neglectful and uncaring ways.

Communal relationships

are those between persons who care about the welfare of the other, as exemplified by friendships, family, and romantic relationships. In communal relation- ships, both parties care for the needs of the other, and both feel an obligation to support the other's welfare. Only communal relationships satisfy the relatedness need. In communal relationships, people monitor and keep track of the other's needs, regard- less of any forthcoming opportunities for reciprocity or material gain

Flow

is a state of concentration that involves a ouholistic absorption and deep involvement in an activity. What people say when they are in a state of flow includes, "I am in the zone," "I am totally focused on what I'm doing," and "It feels like everything clicks". Flow is such a pleasurable experience that the person often repeats the activity with the hope of experiencing flow again and again. Flow occurs whenever a person uses his or her skills to rise up to and overcome some challenge.

The opposite of an organismic approach is a

mechanistic one. In mechanistic theories, the environment acts on the person and the person reacts. For instance, environments produce heat, and the person responds in a predictable and automatic way—by sweat- ing. Sweating leads to water loss, and when the biological systems detect the loss, thirst arises rather automatically (i.e., mechanistically).