Psy 352 – Motivation

Chapter 8 – Goal Setting and Goal Striving

Plans

• People have mental representations of the ideal states of their behavior, environmental objects, and events.
• People are also aware of the present state of their behavior, environment, and events.
• Any mismatch perceived between one’s present state and one’s ideal state instigates an experience of “incongruity”.
• The cognitive mechanism by which plans energize and direct behavior is the test-operate-test-exit (TOTE) model. (fig. 8.1)
• The plans we make effect our motivated behavior – getting started, persisting, stopping, and also attempting to make long-term plans.
• Corrective Motivation
  • Corrective motivation activates a decision-making process in which the person considers many ways for reducing the present-ideal incongruity.
  • Corrective motivation involves emotion.
• Discrepancy – a core motivational construct. It creates the sense of wanting to change the present state so that you are closer to the ideal state.
  • What can I do to increase motivation?
• Two Types of Discrepancy
  • Discrepancy reduction – discrepancy-detecting feedback.
  • Discrepancy creation – feed-forward system.
• The discrepancy provides the motivational basis for you to act.
  • Discrepancy reduction corresponds to a plan-based action
  • Discrepancy creation corresponds to a goal-setting action.

Goals

• Something an individual is striving to accomplish.
• Performance – goal setting generally improves your performance.
  • Goal difficulty – how hard a goal is to accomplish.
  • Goal specificity – how clearly a goal informs the performer precisely what he is to do. Specific goals reduce ambiguity in thought and variability in performance.
• Difficult, Specific Goals Enhance Performance
  • Difficult goals increase your effort and persistence because you continue.
  • Performance depends on goals, but also ability, training, coaching, and resources.
• Question: Identify an important life goal. Revise/restate that goal so that it is as difficult and as specific a goal as you can state it.
• Feedback – important in making goal setting effective.
  • Knowledge of results allows you to track your progress toward any goal.
  • Feedback needs a goal or standard of performance, so that you can judge yourself as below, at, or above the goal.
  • Goal attainment leads to emotional satisfaction, whereas goal failure leads to emotional dissatisfaction.
• Goal Acceptance – the person’s decision to accept or reject the goal.
  • It leads to goal commitment.
  • Four factors determine whether an externally set goal will be accepted or rejected:
    • Perceived difficulty of the imposed goal
    • Participation in the goal-setting process
    • Credibility of the person assigning the goal
    • Extrinsic incentives – Goal acceptance is highest when goals are perceived to be easy or moderately difficult.

• • Criticisms
    • The purpose of goal setting is to enhance performance, not necessarily to motivate you.
    • Goal setting works best when tasks are relatively uninteresting and require only a straightforward procedure.
    • Goal setting can limit its utility in certain settings due to stress, opportunities for failure, and putting creativity and intrinsic motivation at risk.
• Long-Term Goal Setting
  • To accomplish a distant goal, you should attain several short-term goals.
  • Short term goals provide repeated commitment-boosting opportunities
  • On uninteresting tasks, short-term goals create opportunities for positive feedback
  • On interesting tasks, long term goals facilitate intrinsic motivation.
• Personal Strivings – what you are aiming to accomplish daily and throughout your life. Personal strivings reflect general personality, dispositions, whereas goals reflect situationally specific objectives.
• Personal Growth and Subjective Well-Being – People often strive for extrinsic reasons. Personal strivings that develop personal growth and well-being are those that seek greater autonomy, competence, or relatedness in one’s life.
  • Subjective well-being comes from the content of what one is trying to do.
  • When people strive for money or popularity, they separate themselves from personal meaning that leads to negative affect, alienation and distress, even when you attain your strivings.

Implementation Intentions

• Mental Stimulations: Focusing on Action
  • Research shows that focusing on the goal interfered with goal attainment.
  • Visualizing fantasies of success do not produce productive behavior.
  • People need to mentally simulate a goal process
• Formulating Implementation Intentions
  • People often fail to act on the goals they set for themselves.
  • Planning how to attain a goal is an integral part of the goal-performance relationship.
  • Volitional problems emerge:
    • Getting started
    • Persisting
    • Resuming
  • An implementation intention is the study of how goals, once set, are effectively acted on.
  • Once an intention is formed, the presence of an anticipated situational cue automatically initiates goal-directed action.
  • Implementation intentions facilitate goal directed behavior by helping you get started and finished.
• Goal Pursuit: Getting Started
  • Implementation intentions create habits.
• Goal Pursuit: Persisting and Finishing
  • Implementation intentions facilitate persistence and reengagement during goal pursuit.
  • Taking the time to plan how, when, where, and for how long you will carry out goal-directed behavior improves your chance of realizing and finishing the goal.

Self Regulation

• Cognitive events allow people to translate their thoughts into actions.
• Metacognitive monitoring.
• Self-regulation is an ongoing, cyclical process.
• Developing more competent self-regulation
  • Occurs within a social learning process and at an observational level.
  • If the person is unable to regulate their behavior and unable to set goals, then gains in self-regulation occur from observing an expert.
  • Observation then leads to imitation.
  • Finally the person is able to competently regulate their behavior on their own and monitor their performance on their own.
  • People can acquire, develop, and master complex skills more quickly and more expertly if they have the benefit of a mentor who models how to set goals, develop strategies, formulate implementation intentions, monitor performance, and evaluate how the on-going goal-performance-feedback process.