The motivational forces we’ve covered so far—hunger, sexual desire, needs for mastery and autonomy—paint a portrait of human nature that is, in some respects, depressing. Motivation seems out of your control—an endless struggle to cope with biological and social needs that you never chose to have in the first place.

Things aren’t quite so bad, though. The factors that affect motivation include thinking. People’s thoughts about themselves and their activities can affect their motivation and success. This simple fact has major implications. Because thoughts are at least partly under your control, the influence of thinking on motivation gives you personal agency: the power to influence your own level of motivation, and thus your daily activities and the course of your life (Bandura, 2001).

Let’s look at different types of thoughts that affect motivation and thereby power personal agency. We begin with goals.

“What do you want to do today?”

“I don’t know, what do you want to do today?”

“I’ve got nothing planned; whatever you want to do.”

These people aren’t likely to be doing much today. They lack goals. In the psychology of motivation, a goal is a mental representation of the aim of an activity (Kruglanski et al., 2002). Goals are key to motivation (Locke & Latham, 1990).

CONCRETE, CHALLENGING GOALS. Not all goals are effective. People often have goals that they never seem to get started on. You might hear people say, “I know smoking is bad for me, and one day I’m gonna quit!” or “Someday I’m going to start knocking off some of this extra weight.” And you might hear them say these same things month after month, year after year.

The problem with those goals is that they’re so vague. When is “one day”? Exactly what does it mean to merely “start knocking off some” weight? If you want to motivate yourself, set goals that are specific and challenging (Locke & Latham, 1990):

PROXIMAL GOALS. Compare these two people, both preparing for a marathon in six months: (1) “I’m going to run 600 miles during the next six months”; (2) “I’m going to run 25 miles a week during the next six months.” Both goals are specific. Both are challenging; in fact, they’re equally challenging, since 25 miles a week equals 100 miles a month equals 600 miles in six months. Yet if you want to keep yourself motivated, Goal #2 is better than Goal #1.

Compared to Goal #1, Goal #2 is a proximal goal, one that specifies what you should do in the near (“proximal”) future. Goal #1 is a distal goal; it specifies an achievement in the distant future. Distal goals can be discouraging. Before you get started, they seem so hard (“600 miles?!”). Once you do start, they still seem so far away (“I’ve been running for one week, and there’s 575 miles to go?!”). Proximal goals seem more manageable, and once you get started, there are markers of progress (“I did it—25 miles in the first week!”).

A study with schoolchildren having trouble learning arithmetic illustrates the power of proximal goals (Bandura & Schunk, 1981). One group of children was given a distal goal: completing a 42-page booklet of arithmetic problems in seven days. A second group received a proximal goal: completing six pages of arithmetic problems a day for seven days. (Yes, those are “the same,” but because the children were just starting to learn arithmetic, the ones in the distal goals condition were unable to divide 42 by 7 to arrive at the strategy of completing 6 pages a day.) At the end of the program, children with proximal goals greatly outperformed others on an arithmetic test and were more interested in learning arithmetic (Bandura & Schunk, 1981).

Keep this result in mind when you have a long-term project. For example, at the start of a college semester, your list of required reading might look overwhelming: “My heavens, my psych textbook has over 750 pages.” Don’t just think of the distal goal (read the whole book in 16 weeks). Set proximal goals (e.g., read one chapter a week). The proximal goals don’t seem as daunting. Achieving them builds your confidence (Stock & Cervone, 1990). And your greater confidence and motivation can boost your achievement.

FEEDBACK. Setting goals is a first step in getting yourself motivated. To see the second step, compare these two situations:

Now imagine that somebody asks, a few days later, how you are doing. For Situation #1, you can tell precisely; if you have read 20 pages, you know “I’m 40% of the way toward my goal.” For Situation #2, you can’t tell; if you have been thinking about the paper but do not have a good idea yet, you do not know if you’ll need five more minutes or five more days of thinking to come up with one.

In Situation #1 you have feedback: information indicating your progress toward a goal. In Situation #2, you lack feedback; you cannot tell exactly how much progress you have made. Situations with feedback are motivating. Situations without feedback can be frustrating and demotivating. Research manipulating feedback, as well as goals, shows this.

In this study (Bandura & Cervone, 1983), participants performed a tiring task: riding an exercise bike. Some participants were given the goal of reaching a specific high level of performance, whereas others were encouraged merely to do their best. In addition, half the participants received feedback showing their exact level of performance, whereas others did not. The only situation that was highly motivating was the combination of goals with feedback (Figure 11.4). The lesson? If you want to motivate people (including yourself), make sure that (1) the goals are clear and (2) people get feedback on how they are doing as they work toward achieving the goals.

This lesson may remind you of our opening story about Emmanuel Yeboah. He not only was deeply committed to his goal. He also (1) possessed a goal that was clear (he aimed not to “ride his bike a lot” but, specifically, to ride from one end of Ghana to the other) and (2) received feedback on his progress (he knew where he was during the trip, and thus was aware of his progress and the miles remaining before he reached his goal).

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Why are goals and feedback so motivating? It is mostly because of how they affect people’s thinking (Bandura & Cervone, 1983, 1986). If feedback shows you are falling short of your goals, you may become angry with yourself and push yourself harder to succeed. If it shows that you are doing well, the feedback can boost your confidence, or perceived self-efficacy (see Chapter 13), which can spur you on to more success (Bandura, 1997). Psychologists have used goal-and-feedback principles in a variety of applications to help people motivate their behavior (Figure 11.5).

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PERSONAL PROJECTS. Some goals motivate behavior that involves one specific task. Consider these three goals:

Each goal can be fulfilled by performing one specific activity in the near future. Other goals, however, are broader in nature. Consider these three:

This second list contains personal projects, which are goals with two defining qualities: Personal projects (1) incorporate a number of different actions with a common purpose that (2) extend over a significant period of time (Little, Salmela-Aro, & Phillips, 2007). To fulfill getting into shape before next summer, for instance, you need to (1) engage in a number of activities (running, dieting, working out in a gym) (2) over a period of weeks or months.

Personal projects help to organize life. Thanks to your personal projects, many of your daily activities are not disconnected behaviors, but meaningfully interconnected efforts to fulfill a long-term goal. The personal project to get into medical school, for example, might motivate activities as diverse as “memorize all the formulas before tomorrow’s chemistry exam,” “make friends with some juniors and seniors who know about medical school applications,” and “move to a quieter dorm where I can study.” People feel happier, and feel that their daily activities are more meaningful, when they are confident in completing projects of personal significance to them (McGregor & Little, 1998; Salmela-Aro, 2009).

TRY THIS!

Personal projects should sound familiar to you from this chapter’s Try This! activity. The project assessments that you completed are essentially the same as those used in the psychology research you are reading about here.

People have more difficulty achieving their aims when different personal projects conflict with one another. Suppose that your goals include both “finding more time for studying” and “finding more time for exercise,” or both “making myself appear smart to others” and “being honest with others.” The incompatibility, or conflict, between the goals can create stress and interfere with their achievement (Emmons & King, 1988; Presseau et al. 2013).

Personal projects contribute to a human quality we mentioned earlier: personal agency (Bandura, 2001). People can motivate themselves and thereby influence their lives and personal development by setting, and remaining committed to, meaningful personal projects.

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AUTOMATICALLY ACTIVATED GOALS. By setting goals, then, you can influence your behavior, “motivating yourself” into action. Goals thus give you more control over your behavior … sometimes.

Other times, goals give you less control. This happens when goals are activated automatically, that is, outside of your conscious awareness. Sometimes a subtle cue in the environment—a sign, a song, a snippet of overhead conversation—will activate a goal in your mind. Once the goal is activated, or cognitively primed (see Chapter 6), it may influence your behavior without you even knowing it.

In one study (Bargh et al., 2001, Study 1), the subtle cues that activated goals automatically came from the words in a word-search puzzle (a matrix of letters in which words are embedded). Participants worked on puzzles containing words that were either (1) achievement-related (succeed, strive, etc.) or (2) motivationally neutral (carpet, river, etc.). Afterward, they tried a second puzzle on which their performance was measured. Participants who read the achievement-related words performed at a higher level on the second puzzle. Though they didn’t realize it, participants’ achievement goals were activated by the puzzle words.

One everyday stimulus that can activate goals automatically is advertising logos. For example, after being shown the logo of Apple, a company known for its creativity, people performed at higher levels on a creativity task (Fitzsimons, Chartrand, & Fitzsimons, 2008). After being shown the logo of Disney, a company that people associate with honesty, participants answered a self-report personality test more honestly. If you asked people why they behaved so creatively or honestly, they couldn’t tell you; automatically activated goals affect people’s behavior without their even knowing it (Custer & Aarts, 2010).

Goals enhance motivation. Sometimes, though, people set concrete goals yet fail to act. Your goal is to start working on a term paper, but a friend calls, you lose track of time, and never get around to it. Your goal is to pay a bill on time, but you start reading a book, forget about the bill, and remember only weeks later that you forgot to pay it. You know what you want to do, but it’s hard to get yourself to do it.

The psychologist Peter Gollwitzer and his colleagues have devised a method to help you achieve the goals you set: implementation intentions. Goals indicate what you want to achieve, whereas implementation intentions specify exactly when and where you will work on achieving those goals (Gollwitzer & Oettingen, 2013). The setting of implementation intentions, then, is another way in which thinking can contribute to motivation.

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A study with college students on Christmas vacation shows how implementation intentions work. Prior to Christmas break, experimenters gave all participants in their study a goal: to write, and submit to the experimenters by the end of the day on December 26th, a report about how they spent Christmas Eve. They instructed half of these participants to form an implementation intention; specifically, these participants, before Christmas, wrote down when and where they would write the Christmas Eve report. The implementation intention helped students achieve their goal of writing the report on time. Three out of four participants with implementation intentions wrote the report, but two-thirds of the participants without implementation intentions failed to do so (Gollwitzer, 1999).

Many subsequent studies confirm that implementation intentions help people put their goals into action (Gollwitzer & Sheeran, 2006). For example, in a study of employees of a large company, researchers used implementation intentions to boost the number of employees receiving flu shots (Milkman et al., 2011). Some employees received a mailer listing times and locations at which free flu shots were available. Others received this same information plus an implementation intention: encouragement to write down an exact day and time at which they would get their shots (Figure 11.6). Implementation intentions worked; significantly more employees with implementation intentions got flu shots. In percentage terms, the effect was not large; flu-shot rates went up by 4.2%. Yet, even that increase represents a significant benefit to public health that was obtained at very little cost.

Implementation intentions are good when you need to accomplish a goal (e.g., start a paper assignment; get a flu shot) in the near future. What about goals in the distant future, such as having enough money for a comfortable retirement or being a healthy, physically fit older adult? Implementation intentions are not much help with distant goals. You can’t fill out a form indicating hundreds of specific occasions, over decades of time, when you will, for example, take steps to be more physically fit (“January 12, 2043, 8 a.m.: Jog 2 miles; January 13, 2043, 7 p.m.: Pass up dessert”). It’s not practical.

Distant goals pose one of the greatest challenges to motivation. Even when they are important, short-term enticements may overwhelm them. Saving money for retirement and being a healthy older adult might be important distant goals for you. But if you see a nice outfit for sale or somebody offers you a couple cookies, it is difficult to pass them up. Today’s temptations trump tomorrow’s goals. Thoughts about the distant future tend to be more abstract than thoughts about the present (Trope & Liberman, 2003). Today’s concrete, here-and-now temptations are so compelling that people often engage in behavior that they know is bad for them in the long run.

Here’s the challenge: How can one make abstract, distant goals more motivating? Hal Hershfield and colleagues (2011) devised a clever strategy based on the following reasoning. Distant goals are not motivating because people do not relate strongly to their future self—the hard-to-picture-me-of-the-future who benefits from distant goals such as saving money for retirement. Hershfield and colleagues thus made the future self easier to envision. They did so with digitally altered photographs. Researchers took pictures of the participants, digitized them, and used computer software to alter the images to make them look older (Figure 11.7).

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In different experimental conditions, participants looked at a digitized image of either (1) their present-day self or (2) their digitally altered future self. Afterward, when participants were asked what they would do if they received $1000, people who had viewed their future self said they would put more than twice as much of the money into a retirement account than did others (Hershfield et al., 2011). An image of the future self made the long-term goal more concrete and motivating.

Goals and implementation intentions, reviewed above, are thinking processes that can increase your motivation and performance on specific tasks. Psychologists also have identified motivational orientations, which are broad patterns of thoughts and feelings that can affect people’s behavior across a wide variety of tasks. Let’s begin our look at motivational orientations with the type of thoughts known as mindsets.

MINDSETS. The psychologist Carol Dweck has identified a motivation orientation she calls mindsets. A mindset is a belief about the nature of psychological attributes, such as intelligence. People’s mindsets differ. Some people believe, for example, that their level of intelligence is fixed; they’ve either “got it” or not. Such people are said to have a fixed mindset. Others believe that intelligence can change; it grows over time, as new experiences convey new skills. Such people have a growth mindset (Dweck, 2006).

Mindsets shape people’s interpretations of how they’re doing. Suppose you try a new activity—such as a college class in a field unfamiliar to you—and at first you have some difficulty learning the material. If you have a growth mindset, you’ll interpret the difficulty as an opportunity to learn; challenges and setbacks will be seen as opportunities to grow your skills. But if you have a fixed mindset, you’ll tend to interpret setbacks as signs that you don’t have enough intelligence. This will make you discouraged, reducing your motivation.

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Dweck and colleagues have shown that people’s mindsets can be changed. They enrolled a group of seventh-graders in an educational program designed to instill a growth mindset. Students were taught that their intelligence can grow and that the growth occurs because nerve cells in their brains form new connections when they work hard at their studying (which is true; see Chapter 3). A separate group of seventh-graders learned basic facts about the brain, but were not told that school experiences could cause their intelligence to grow. Afterward, the researchers asked teachers to report on children’s levels of motivation, and they also recorded the grades children earned during the school year. Children who were taught a growth mindset became more motivated and earned higher grades (Blackwell, Trzesniewski, & Dweck, 2007).

INTRINSIC MOTIVATION. People often are motivated by factors and forces outside of themselves: a parent’s rules, a teacher’s grades, a company’s salary. But sometimes people are motivated by factors inside themselves. Intrinsic motivation is the desire to engage in activities because they are personally interesting, challenging, and enjoyable (Ryan & Deci, 2000).

One aspect of life that highlights the power of intrinsic motivation is hobbies. If you take up a hobby—music, knitting, fishing, bird watching, stamp collecting, or whatever strikes your fancy—the activity might not serve any fundamental biological or achievement need. You might not do it with any specific goal in mind. You might not be trying to earn money or win a prize. It’s just something you find interesting—an enjoyable, relaxing, intrinsically interesting break from the duties and demands of the rest of your day.

A unique feature of intrinsic motivation is that rewards from others can decrease, rather than increase, motivation. In classic research, researchers studied a group of children who were interested in drawing, in other words, who were intrinsically motivated to draw (Lepper, Greene, & Nisbett, 1973; see Chapter 7). The researchers gave some of these children a reward for drawing: a gold star. As a motivator, the gold star backfired in the long run; it reduced the children’s intrinsic motivation. When they had some free time, children who had received the gold star were less motivated to engage in drawing.

In subsequent years, additional research examined the effects of external rewards on intrinsically motivated behavior. Results confirmed the original findings. A meta-analysis of 128 studies indicated that when people are intrinsically motivated to engage in an activity, and then receive an external reward for that activity (a prize or money), their intrinsic motivation goes down (Deci, Koestner, & Ryan, 1999).

Why do rewards lower intrinsic motivation? One reason is that they reduce people’s sense of autonomy, that is, the sense that one is personally in charge of one’s own behaviors, which are consistent with one’s own personal values and interests (Ryan & Deci, 2000). If you choose an activity yourself (e.g., learning to play the guitar), the personal choice increases your feeling of autonomy, and the activity seems interesting. If somebody gives you a reward to engage in an activity (e.g., offers to pay you to learn the guitar), the external reward reduces your sense of personal autonomy, and you have less intrinsic motivation.

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Theorists have viewed autonomy as a universal need (Ryan & Deci, 2000), in other words, one experienced in the same manner by people everywhere in the world. Although research conducted with people from Western cultures (North America, Western Europe) supports this view, research with people from other parts of the world suggests that cultures may differ (see Cultural Opportunities).

CULTURAL OPPORTUNITIES

PROMOTION, PREVENTION, AND REGULATORY FIT. If you walk around a college library during final exam week, you will see a lot of people studying. If you ask them why they are studying, they might all say much the same thing: to do well on finals. But if you probe a little deeper, you will find differences. One person might respond, “I’m studying because it’s important to reaching my long-term goal of being a doctor.” Another might answer, “I’m studying because I don’t want to disappoint my family; they’re counting on me to be a doctor.” These people have different motivational orientations known as promotion and prevention (Higgins, 1997):

Note that motivational orientations can differ even among people taking part in exactly the same activity. The motivational orientation does not describe what people are doing. It describes the way people think about what they are doing.

How do motivational orientations relate to behavior? They do so through a principle known as regulatory fit. Regulatory fit is the match between a motivational orientation and a behavioral strategy (Higgins, 2005), that is, a behavior means for reaching a goal. Just as there are different motivational orientations, there are different behavioral strategies. Sometimes strategies and motivational orientations go together psychologically: They “fit” together, like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle (Figure 11.8). When this happens—when there’s a fit—people are happier and more satisfied with what they’re doing. Here’s an example.

In one study, researchers experimentally manipulated prevention versus promotion focus through an essay task (Freitas & Higgins, 2002). Some participants wrote essays about their personal hopes and aspirations, which created a promotion focus in those participants. Others wrote about their duties and obligations in life. This created a prevention focus. Afterwards, everyone evaluated different strategies for earning a high GPA in college. Some strategies were accomplishments one could attain (e.g., Complete schoolwork promptly). Others were negative outcomes to avoid (e.g., Stop procrastinating). Which strategies did the students like more? It depended on their motivational orientation. When promotion-focused, students liked the accomplishment-based strategies. When prevention-focused, they liked the avoidance-based strategies. In short, they liked the strategies that “fit” their current motivational orientation.

FLOW STATES. A fourth motivational orientation has been given the name flow by the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (1990). (In case you were wondering what sound to make when seeing those letters, his last name is pronounced roughly chick-SENT-me-hi.) Flow is a psychological state in which people’s attention is directed intently on an activity for a prolonged period of time. During flow states, people feel immersed in the activity. They are at one with the environment and the challenges it presents and are not distracted by thoughts about themselves, how they look, or their daily concerns. In flow states, people are motivated (they engage in sustained activity and often achieve high levels of performance), yet they are not focusing on motivational inducements such as pay or enhanced self-esteem. Rather, they are focusing on the activity itself.

Flow experiences are distinctive states of consciousness (Weber et al., 2009; see Chapter 9). In flow states, there is intense concentration. Events seem ordered, meaningful, and controllable. Activities may appear to unfold more slowly than normal. People experience a pleasurable, powerful sense of control during flow states.

One group of people who you may hear describing flow states is athletes. Successful competitors may say they were “in the zone”: an altered state of concentration in which the game seems easy. Its flow of activity, fast and frantic for most people, is slow and calm for the athlete “in the zone”—or, in Csikszentmihalyi’s terms, in a flow state.

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There is nothing unique about athletics. A wide variety of activities can produce states of flow. The two key ingredients for creating flow states are the presence of (1) challenges that do not exceed people’s skills, and (2) clear task goals and feedback (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990). Any activity with these ingredients can provide a sense of flow. People may have flow experiences while, for example, playing a musical instrument, working on a craft or hobby, playing chess, or painting. Even video games can produce flow experiences when they provide challenges that match players’ skills (Hsu & Lu, 2004).

Researchers study flow experiences by measuring the quality of people’s experiences. They do so at multiple times a day, while people engage in a variety of everyday activities (see Research Toolkit). This enables the researcher to determine whether certain types of activities are more likely to produce flow experiences. In one study (Csikszentmihalyi & LeFevre, 1989), a diverse group of more than 100 adults reported on their activities and experiences multiple times a day for a week. Specifically, they reported three key pieces of information: (a) whether their current activity was challenging and appropriate to their skills; (b) what they were doing (working, socializing, eating, etc.), and (c) whether they were experiencing psychological flow and its accompanying feelings of alertness, motivation, and happiness.

As predicted, participants reported more flow experiences when they were doing something challenging and had skills to meet the challenges. When there were no challenges, they were bored (Csikszentmihalyi & LeFevre, 1989). Surprisingly, however, high-flow activities were more likely to occur at work than during free time. Managers discussing workplace problems, clerical workers typing information, and blue-collar workers fixing equipment each reported flow experiences on the job. When at leisure, flow was less common. This is surprising; you might expect that in their free time, people would pick activities they enjoy. But nearly half of people’s free time was spent watching TV—which provides few challenges and thus often induces boredom rather than flow. Also surprising were the results associated with a major activity for commuters: driving. People often complain about their commute. But driving presents challenges and skills; you navigate at high speeds through highway traffic. Driving produced the highest rates of flow experiences (Csikszentmihalyi & LeFevre, 1989).

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RESEARCH TOOLKIT