Social Motivation

Motivation

any internal process that gives behaviour is energy, direction, and persistence:

• energy = behaviour has strength

• direction = behaviour has purpose

• persistence = behaviour has endurance

Internal Process

• need = conditions that are essential for the maintenance of life and for the nurturance of growth and well-being

  • e.g., hunger, thirst, sleep, autonomy, competence, relatedness

• cognition = mental events capable of energizing and directing behaviour

  • e.g., beliefs, expectations, goals, plans, attributions, mindsets, self-concept

• emotion = short-lived feeling-arousal-purposive-expressive phenomena that helps us adapt to the opportunities and challenges we face during important life events

Why Study Motivation

• theoretical understanding

• practical understanding

• scientific study = using objective empirical evidence gained from well-conducted and peer-reviewed research to answer questions

  • describe and explain behaviour

• what causes behaviour?

• distal vs. proximal causes of behaviour

Expressions of Motivation

• behaviour

  • effort

  • persistence

  • latency

  • choice

  • probability of response

  • facial expressions

  • bodily gestures

• engagement

  • behaviour

  • emotion

  • cognition

  • agency

• psychophysiology

  • hormonal activity

  • cardiovascular activity

  • etc.

• brain activation

• self-report

Unifying themes about motivation

• Motivation and emotion benefit adaptation and functioning

• Motivation needs supportive conditions to flourish

• Motivation and emotion are intervening variables

• Motivation and emotion are dynamic

• Types of motivations exists

• Motivation states can be understood at multiple levels

• We are not always aware of the motivational basis of behaviours

Direct vs. Indirect (mediated) effect

• direct = x ————→ y

• indirect = x ———> y ———→ z

Need

• conditions that are essential for the maintenance of life and for the nurturance of growth and well-being

  • physiological needs = a biological condition that regulate bodily well-being and corrects imbalances that are potential threats to growth, well-being, and life

    • often arise from a deficiency

  • distinguishing needs = direction of behaviour

• psychological needs

  • Living organisms depend on their environments and must constantly respond and adapt to them

  • Psychological need = a psychological nutrient that is critical to mental health, personal growth, and overall well-being

    • Beyond survival, psychological needs promote optimal performance

Drive Theory 

• Proposed by Clark Hull (1943)

• Physiological deprivations and deficits create biological needs

• If needs remain unsatisfied, biological deprivation becomes strong enough to occupy attention and generate psychological drive

  • Drive = psychological discomfort (tension and restlessness)

• Drive energizes activity towards behaviour that mitigates the biological deficit

Homeostasis vs. Negative Feedback

• Homeostasis = the tendency to maintain a steady ideal state of equilibrium within the body

  • E.g., optimal hydration, blood glucose levels, body temperature

  • When disrupted, a drive activates behavior to compensate and return to the ideal state

• Negative feedback = the mechanism that stops behavior once the steady state is reached (opponents process to drive)

Intra- vs. extraorganismic mechanisms

• Intraorganismic mechanisms = all biological regulatory systems within the person that act in concert to activate, and maintain, and terminate the biological needs that underlie drive

  • E.g., hunger - low blood glucose levels trigger feelings of hunger (appetite), which trigger eating behavior

• Extraorganismic mechanisms = all the non-biological influences that play a part in activating, maintaining, and terminating drive

  • E.g., hunger = the appearance/smell of a meal affects your appetite, which affects how much of it you eat

Basic Criteria for defining a psychological need

1. Psychological = not related to the physical function of humans

2. Essential = satisfaction leads to growth and well-being, frustration leads to ill-being

3. Inherent = evolved and provides adaptive advantages

4. Distinct = not contingent or derived from frustration of other needs

5. Universal = present/crucial regardless of SES, personality, culture, etc.

Need satisfaction and need frustration

• Need satisfaction contributes to:

  • Intrinsic motivation = motivation that arises from an inherent and spontaneous inclination towards interest, exploration, and environmental mastery

  • Engagement

  • Personal growth

  • Internalization

  • Health

  • Well-being

• Need frustration predicts maladaptive behavior, ill functioning, passivity

• Most environments offer a combination of support and thwarting needs

Autonomy

• The psychological need to experience self-direction and personal endorsement in the initiation and regulation of one's behavior

  • Volitional action/agency

  • Self-endorsement/ownership

• Experienced when decision-making process to engage in an activity is informed by our interests, preferences, desires, and values

  • Self-concordance

Autonomy Support

1. Perspective-taking

2. Helping to clarify personal importance of choice/pursuit of personal interests to satisfy needs

3. Providing explanatory rationales

4. Acknowledging and accepting expressions of negative affect

5. Using invitational language

6. Displaying patience

The paradox of choice

• Ideally, choice should be:

  • Not overwhelming

  • Unconstrained

  • Meaningful

• Choices based on personal values, goals, and interests lead to positive post-choice functioning

  • Intrinsic motivation, effort, creativity, preference for challenge, performance

 

Reactions to autonomy frustration

• Reactance = increased desire to enact a behavior, due to a restriction in behavioral freedom

• Learned helplessness = when people come to expect that outcomes are independent of their behavior

Competence

• The psychological need to be effective in one's interactions with the environment

  • Extend one's capacities and skills

  • Master optimal challenges and personal growth opportunities

  • Experienced when one makes progress, improves, and produces intentional effects on the environment

optimal challenge and flow

• Flow = a subjective state where people feel completely absorbed and focused on a task

  • Arises when there is an optimal match between skill and activity challenge (i.e. both are moderate-to-high)

  • Benefits include greater enjoyment, better performance

 

Competence support

• Structure

  • Clear expectations

  • Guidance

    • Zone of proximal development

    • Scaffolding

  • Feedback

Feedback - cognitive evaluation theory

• How should external events (e.g., feedback) be structured to induce intrinsic motivation?

• The effect of an external event on intrinsic motivation depends on 2 aspects of the event

  1. Controlling aspect (feedback re: autonomy)

  2. Informational aspect (feedback re: competence)

• External events that increase autonomy and competence will increase intrinsic motivation

Failure Tolerance

• Targeting optimal challenge means success is just as likely as failure

  • Failure can often be frustrating and cause avoidance

• To encourage individuals to pursue optimally challenging tasks, the environment must tolerate/value failure and errors

• The constructive value of errors

  • Prompts people to identify causes and remedies

  • Prompts people to improve their coping strategies

  • Prompts people to recognize the need for advice and support

 

Reactions to loss of competence

• Self-serving attributional bias = the tendency to take credit for one's success, but deny personal responsibility for failures

  • Prevents learning from failure

• Self-handicapping behavior = when failure is anticipated, people may create barriers to their own performance/success; creates external factors can then be blamed in the event of failure

Relatedness

• The psychological need to establish social connections with others

  • Warm, close interactions and emotional bonds

  • To care and to feel cared for by other people (and organizations)

• Experienced when one feels loved, valued, and appreciated by others

  • Authenticity, trust, reciprocity, and meaning

  • Communal vs. exchange relationships

Relatedness Support

• Responsive interactions

  1. Understanding = communicates authenticity

  2. Validation = communicates liking and acceptance

  3. Caring = communicates concern for one's well-being

Benefits of relatedness satisfaction

• Engagement

  • E.g, engagement, effort, drop out rates in students

• Personal growth

  • E.g., resilience to stress, self-esteem

• Internalization and intrinsic motivation

• Health and well-being

reactions to relatedness frustration (rejection)

• Hurt feelings

• Emotional numbness

• Impaired cognitive functioning

• Aggression

• Poor mental health outcomes

Extrinsic motivation

• Motivation that arises from environmental consequences (incentives or disincentives) to do a behavior

  • Do X, get Y

• Based on operant conditioning principles

  • Engaging in behaviors that produce desired consequences/not engaging in behaviors that produce undesired consequences

Reinforcers vs. punishers

• Reinforcer = any object or event that increases a behavior

  • Positive reinforcer = increases behavior because a desirable stimulus is presented

  • Negative reinforcer = increases behavior because an undesirable stimulus is presented

  • Negative punisher = decreases behavior because of a desirable stimulus is removed

• Reinforcer vs. reward

Effectiveness of punishers

• Is compliance the intended outcome?

• Other (unintentional) consequences

  • Negative emotionality (e.g., fear, over-arousal)

  • Impaired relationship between punisher and punishee

  • Modeling of negative ways of coping with undesirable behavior in others

Extrinsic vs. intrinsic motivation

• Intrinsic motivation = motivation that arises from an inherent and spontaneous inclination towards interest, exploration, and environmental mastery

  • Emerges from innate strivings for personal growth and psychological need satisfaction

effectiveness of rewards

• Extrinsic motivation can be useful when trying to increase socially important but intrinsically uninteresting behaviors

  • Developing basic life skills

  • Encouraging safe driving practices

  • Increasing pro-environmental behaviors

• When necessary, external rewards should be unpredictable and intangible to avoid undermining intrinsic motivation

types of extrinsic motivation

• External regulation = behavior is enacted to obtain a reward, to avoid a punishment, or to satisfy an external demand

• Introjected regulation = behavior is enacted to satisfy an external demand that has been partially internalized (to obtain a self-administered reward or to avoid a self-administered punishment)

• Identified regulation = behavior is enacted because it is personally important or useful

• Integrated regulation = behavior is enacted because it coheres with values that have been incorporated into the self

Internalization

• Internalization = the process through which an individual transforms a formerly externally prescribed rule, behavior, or value into an internally endorsed one

  • Integration = transformation of internalized values, behaviors, and regulations into a person's sense of self

• Motivating others externally on uninteresting activities

  • Value-enhancing strategies = providing new information that sparks valuing, identified regulation, and internalization

  • Interest-enhancing strategies = e.g., setting a goal, adding an extra source of stimulation

cognition ——> action

• Cognition = a broad umbrella term that describes mental events such as information processing, decision-making, memory, and problem-solving

  • In motivation science, cognitive activity acts as a "spring to action" that energizes and directs behavior towards a purpose

  • E.g., beliefs, expectations, goals, plans, mindsets, judgments, values, self-concept

discrepancy

• Individuals hold mental representations of an ideal state of behavior, environment, and events

• Mismatches between reality and ideal = incongruity, which is experienced as uncomfortable

• When incongruity is sufficiently uncomfortable, people formulate and enact a plan to remove it

• Present state <-----> ideal state

 

types of discrepancy

• Discrepancy reduction

  • Individual receives environmental feedback

  • Deficiency-overcoming

  • Reactive to environmental feedback that flags discrepancy between present and ideal state

  • Negative feedback system

  • Underlies planning

• Discrepancy creation

  • Individual looks forward and imagines a prospective (future) ideal state

  • Growth-pursuing

  • Proactive, creation of ideal state that does not yet exist

  • Positive/feed-forward system

  • Enables goal-setting process

goal setting

• Goal = a future-focused cognitive representation of a desired end state that guides behavior towards accomplishing that end state

  • Enabled by discrepancy-creation process

  • Those who set goals tend to outperform those who do not = direct attention

  • However, not all goals are created equal

 

goal features

• Goal difficulty - how hard is the goal to accomplish?

  • Effort is proportional to difficulty

• Goal specificity - how clearly does the goal inform the performer of precisely what to do?

  • Specificity reduces ambiguity in thought and variability in performance

  • Can be enhanced using a goal hierarchy

• Goal congruence - how authentic and self-endorsed is the goal?

  • Self-concordance leverages personal resources

goal proximity

• Goals can be distal (long-term), or proximal (short-term)

• Proximity affects goals provide repeated opportunities for feedback and reinforcement

• On uninteresting tasks, proximal goals enhance intrinsic motivation (through positive feedback and greater competence)

Achievement goals

• When faced with a standard of excellence (i.e., any challenge that ends with an objective outcome of success vs. failure, win vs. lose, right vs. wrong), people may set differing achievement goals

• Performance goals = desire to demonstrate or prove skills, outperform others, and succeed with little effort

  • Typically framed in interpersonal terms (i.e., using others as a point of comparison)

  • Performance-approach vs. performance-avoidance goals

• Learning (mastery) goals = desire to develop greater skills, make progress and overcome challenge through persistence and effort

  • Typically framed in intrapersonal terms (i.e., using the self as a metric for "success")

goal-setting caveats

• Goals tend to be the most effective when tasks are relatively uninteresting and require only a straightforward procedure

  • Generate motivation that the task itself cant generate

  • For inherently interesting tasks that require creativity or problem-solving, goals do not necessarily enhance performance

• Goals can conflict with one another

  • Goal shielding and prioritization

• Goals can undermine intrinsic motivation when they are controlling, pressure-inducing, and intrusive

goal striving

the process of attaining a goal through effort, persistence, focused attention, and strategic planning

Mental simulations

• Mental simulations = imaging aspects of a goal in one's mind

  • Goal content (outcome)

  • Goal striving (process)

• Simulations focusing on goal striving are more effective than those focusing on goal content

  • Lowers anxiety

  • Encourages planning for distractions and finding solutions

• Example = vision boards

implementation intentions

• Implementation intention = "if-then" plan that specifies in advance how goal-striving will occur

  • When, where, how

  • "if" = situational cue; "then" = behavioral response

    • Not always in this format

  • Requires skill = one must identify a behavioral response that promotes goal achievement and link it with situational cues to initiate the response

• Implementations help people achieve goals by helping them

  • Get started

  • Stay on track

  • Resume

• Moderators of the effect of implementation intentions

  • Goal difficulty

  • Goals driven by intrinsic vs. extrinsic motivation

• Caveat = implementation intentions, when too rigid, may restrict/discourage other behaviors that may also promote goal attainment

maximizing goal attainment

1. Flexibility

   • Rigid approaches to goal striving demand more effort; problematic when payoff is small

   • Rigid approaches to goal striving encourage an all-or-nothing perception

2. Accountability

   • Write it down!

   • Tell someone; ideally someone who will encourage you and keep you accountable

3. Planning fallacy

   • After falling to accomplish a goal, self-serving bias makes it even more difficult to learn from our mistakes