Motivational
Peers, Pressure, and Performance at the National Spelling Bee
Jonathan Smith
Journal of Human Resources, Spring 2013, Pages 265-285
Abstract:
This paper investigates how individuals' performances of a cognitive task in a high-pressure competition are affected by their peers' performances. To do so, I use novel data from the National Spelling Bee, in which students attempt to spell words correctly in a tournament setting. Across OLS and instrumental variables approaches, I find that when the immediate predecessor is correct, a speller has a 13 to 64 percent greater probability of making a mistake, relative to the predecessor being incorrect. There is no evidence that the effect differs by gender and marginal evidence that it differs by experience.
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Dying to watch: Thoughts of death and preferences for sexual media content
Laramie Taylor
Journal of Media Psychology, Spring 2013, Pages 55-64
Abstract:
Research has shown that thoughts about death influence sexual cognitions and some media choices. The present study tested the hypothesis that thoughts about death may affect individuals' tendency to select or avoid entertainment media programming containing sexual material. In two experiments, thoughts about death (mortality salience [MS]) were manipulated before college undergraduates expressed interest in viewing television shows and movies with varying amounts of sexual content. In both studies, MS was associated with greater overall interest in sexual media content. Although terror management theory would indicate that sexual worldview should moderate this effect, this was not observed to be the case. In addition, MS was not found to affect interest in other types of highly engaging media content including violent and dramatic content. Limitations regarding generalizability are discussed. Results suggest that MS increases a preference for sexual media content, and that this occurs for individuals with diverse sexual values systems. This is discussed in terms of implications for terror management theory and cognitive models of media influence.
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Consequences of Beliefs about the Malleability of Creativity
Alexander O'Connor, Charlan Nemeth & Satoshi Akutsu
Creativity Research Journal, Spring 2013, Pages 155-162
Abstract:
Attempts to maximize creativity pervade corporate, artistic, and scientific domains. This research investigated how individual's lay beliefs about the malleability of creativity affect several measures of creative potential. Two correlational and 1 experimental study examined the relationship between malleability beliefs about creativity and creative problem-solving and prior creative achievement. In Study 1, incremental beliefs in creativity were associated with interest in creative thinking, self-reported creativity, and creative problem-solving. In Study 2, incremental beliefs were associated with prior creative achievement in a cross-cultural, professional sample. In Study 3, incremental primes of creativity led to improved creative problem-solving. All studies provide discriminant validity and domain-specificity for malleability beliefs in creativity. Specifically, Studies 1 and 2 controlled for individual differences in beliefs about the malleability of intelligence, suggesting that malleability beliefs of creativity and intelligence are meaningfully distinct. Meanwhile, Study 3 found that incremental beliefs of creativity enhance creative problem-solving but not problem-solving more generally.
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Should Managers Use Team-Based Contests?
Hua Chen & Noah Lim
Management Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
When designing contests to motivate employees, should managers organize employees to compete in teams or as individuals? We develop a behavioral economics model that shows that if contestants are averse to being responsible for the team's loss, a team-based (TB) contest can yield higher effort than an individual-based (IB) contest. This prediction is contrary to those of standard economics models, which favor IB contests over TB contests. We test the competing predictions using laboratory economics experiments. The results show that when contestants do not know each other, average effort levels in the TB and IB contests are not different. When contestants are allowed to socialize with potential teammates before making effort decisions, TB contests yield higher effort relative to IB contests. We also show that the relative efficacy of TB contests is driven by contestants' aversion to letting their team down.
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Does implicit theory of intelligence cause achievement goals? Evidence from an experimental study
Felix Dinger & Oliver Dickhäuser
International Journal of Educational Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
The reported experiment tested if individuals' subjective belief about the malleability of intelligence causes their achievement goals. Eighty university students were randomly assigned to read one of two articles portraying intelligence as a learned vs. an innate ability (incremental condition vs. entity condition). Afterward, we assessed subjects' implicit theory of intelligence and achievement goals. Subjects in the incremental condition recalled a significantly lower heritability of intelligence and more strongly endorsed an incremental view of intelligence than those in the entity condition. Furthermore, subjects held higher levels of mastery goals and lower levels of performance-avoidance goals in the incremental condition than in the entity condition. Finally, the effect of experimental condition on mastery goals was mediated by subjects' implicit theory of intelligence. Findings suggest that highlighting intellectual abilities as malleable rather than fixed creates motivationally more adaptive learning environments.
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Children's Naive Theories of Intelligence Influence Their Metacognitive Judgments
David Miele, Lisa Son & Janet Metcalfe
Child Development, forthcoming
Abstract:
Recent studies have shown that the metacognitive judgments adults infer from their experiences of encoding effort vary in accordance with their naive theories of intelligence. To determine whether this finding extends to elementary schoolchildren, a study was conducted in which 27 third graders (Mage = 8.27) and 24 fifth graders (Mage = 10.39) read texts presented in easy- or difficult-to-encode fonts. The more children in both grades viewed intelligence as fixed, the less likely they were to interpret effortful or difficult encoding as a sign of increasing mastery and the more likely they were to report lower levels of comprehension as their perceived effort increased. This suggests that children may use naive theories of intelligence to make motivationally relevant inferences earlier than previously thought.
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Self-talk and Competitive Sport Performance
Antonis Hatzigeorgiadis et al.
Journal of Applied Sport Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
The purpose of the present study was to test the effectiveness of a 10-week self-talk intervention on competitive performance in young swimmers. Participants were 41 swimmers (mean age 14.59 ± 1.58 years), whose performance was recorded on two competitive occasions with a 10-week interval. In-between the two competitions, participants in the intervention group followed a self-talk training program. The results showed that the intervention group had greater performance improvements than the control group, thus supporting the effectiveness of the program in enhancing sport performance in a competitive environment. The findings provide directions for the development of effective self-talk interventions.
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Stutter-Step Models of Performance in School
Stephen Morgan et al.
Social Forces, June 2013, Pages 1451-1474
Abstract:
To evaluate a stutter-step model of academic performance in high school, this article adopts a unique measure of the beliefs of 12,591 high school sophomores from the Education Longitudinal Study, 2002-2006. Verbatim responses to questions on occupational plans are coded to capture specific job titles, the listing of multiple jobs, and the listing of multiple jobs with divergent characteristics. The educational requirements of detailed jobs, as specified in the Department of Labor's Occupational Information Network database, are then matched to all jobs that students list within their plans. Students with uncertain beliefs about their occupational futures are then shown to have lower levels of commitment to and performance in school. These results support the conjecture that uncertainty about the future has consequences for the short-run behavior that determines important educational outcomes, beyond the effects that are commonly attributed to existing models of performance.
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Darren Grant & William Green
Empirical Economics, June 2013, Pages 1563-1592
Abstract:
This paper examines how grade incentives affect student learning across a variety of courses at two universities, using for identification the discrete rewards offered by the standard A-F letter-grade system. We develop and test five predictions about the provision of study effort and the distribution of numerical course averages in the presence of the thresholds that separate these discrete rewards. Surprisingly, all are rejected in our data. There is no evidence that exam performance is improved for those students that stand to gain the most from additional study.
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Joking in the face of death: A terror management approach to humor production
Christopher Long & Dara Greenwood
Humor, forthcoming
Abstract:
Terror management theory has spawned a body of experimental research documenting a multitude of defensive responses to mortality salience manipulations (e.g., rigid adherence to dominant cultural values, self-esteem bolstering). Another substantive body of work suggests that humor functions as a natural and often effective means of down-regulating stressful or traumatic experiences. Integrating a terror management paradigm with a cartoon captioning task, the present study finds that participants subliminally primed with death wrote funnier captions than those primed with pain, as judged by outside raters. Interestingly, a reverse pattern was obtained for participants' own ratings of their captions; explicitly death-primed participants rated themselves more successful at generating humorous captions than their pain-primed counterparts, while no significant difference emerged between the two subliminal priming conditions. Findings contribute new insights to recent research suggesting that death reminders may sometimes facilitate creativity and open-mindedness.
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Existential motive underlying cosmetic surgery: A terror management analysis
Kim-Pong Tam
Journal of Applied Social Psychology, May 2013, Pages 947-955
Abstract:
Why do people consider cosmetic surgery? Based on the terror management theory, the present research identifies an existential motive: Through cosmetic surgery, people can symbolically defend against their death anxiety. A correlational study and an experiment showed that death terror, whether operationalized as individual differences in fear of death or experimentally manipulated mortality salience, was associated with stronger acceptance of cosmetic surgery. This association was absent among participants who did not consider physical appearance important, and weaker among those who were satisfied about their appearance. Also, this association was particularly strong among those with high explicit self-esteem. This concurs with the recent theoretical development about the role of self-esteem in symbolic defenses against death terror.
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Rebels with a cause: A goal conflict approach to understanding when conscientious people dissent
Dominic Packer, Kentaro Fujita & Scott Herman
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Highly conscientious people are more likely than others to actively pursue their goals, but whether their goals support the status quo and result in conformity, or are pursuant of social change and result in dissent is likely to depend on other factors, including how they subjectively construe dissent decisions. We propose a goal conflict approach to dissent, positing that dissent (vs. conformity) is motivated by concern for broad/long-term (vs. local/short-term) group outcomes: a preference for change and improvement as opposed to stability and group enhancement. Two experiments employed a construal level manipulation to shift the goals of group members varying in conscientiousness. As predicted, high-level (vs. low-level) construal promoted greater willingness to articulate (Study 1) and actually express (Study 2) non-normative ingroup criticism among highly conscientious individuals.
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The Motivational Dynamics of Dissent Decisions: A Goal-Conflict Approach
Dominic Packer, Kentaro Fujita & Alison Chasteen
Social Psychological and Personality Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
We propose that dissent decisions involve a tension between shorter term group stability goals and longer term group change goals. Strongly identified members may be animated by either goal, and their behavior with respect to group norms is influenced by which is currently dominant. In two experiments, we manipulated construal level, a factor that affects goal selection, such that people are more likely to make decisions that further long-term goals at high (vs. low) construal level. As predicted, at high construal level, strong identifiers were more willing to dissent from group norms than weak identifiers; at low construal level, strong identifiers were equally or more conformist. These findings advance understanding of the motivational dynamics of dissent decisions and speak to the nature of depersonalization/self-categorization in groups. Identified members retained individual agency and exercised their own judgment regarding group norms, choosing to deviate when they perceived it to be in the group's interest.
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Self-Esteem Instability and Academic Outcomes in American and Chinese College Students
Virgil Zeigler-Hill et al.
Journal of Research in Personality, forthcoming
Abstract:
The connection between self-esteem instability and various academic outcomes was examined across two studies. Study 1 (N = 419) found that unstable self-esteem was associated with poor academic performance for American undergraduate college students. Further, unstable self-esteem was associated with higher levels of academic disengagement and devaluation for individuals with high levels of self-esteem. Study 2 included college students from the United States (N = 167) and China (N = 178). As in Study 1, unstable self-esteem was associated with poor academic performance and higher levels of academic devaluation for individuals with high levels of self-esteem. However, the association between unstable self-esteem and academic disengagement emerged only for American college students with high self-esteem.