Motives and Behavior
Keep Your Fingers Crossed! How Superstition Improves Performance
Lysann Damisch, Barbara Stoberock & Thomas Mussweiler
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Superstitions are typically seen as inconsequential creations of irrational minds. Nevertheless, many people rely on superstitious thoughts and practices in their daily routines in order to gain good luck. To date, little is known about the consequences and potential benefits of such superstitions. The present research closes this gap by demonstrating performance benefits of superstitions and identifying their underlying psychological mechanisms. Specifically, Experiments 1 through 4 show that activating good-luck-related superstitions via a common saying or action (e.g., “break a leg,” keeping one’s fingers crossed) or a lucky charm improves subsequent performance in golfing, motor dexterity, memory, and anagram games. Furthermore, Experiments 3 and 4 demonstrate that these performance benefits are produced by changes in perceived self-efficacy. Activating a superstition boosts participants’ confidence in mastering upcoming tasks, which in turn improves performance. Finally, Experiment 4 shows that increased task persistence constitutes one means by which self-efficacy, enhanced by superstition, improves performance.
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Liz Day, Katie Hanson, John Maltby, Carmel Proctor & Alex Wood
Journal of Research in Personality, forthcoming
Abstract:
A 3-year longitudinal study explored whether the two-dimensional model of trait hope predicted degree scores after considering intelligence, personality, and previous academic achievement. A sample of 129 respondents (52 males, 77 females) completed measures of trait hope, general intelligence, the five factor model of personality, divergent thinking, as well as objective measures of their academic performance before university (‘A’ level grades) and final degree scores. The findings suggest that hope uniquely predicts objective academic achievement above intelligence, personality, and previous academic achievement. The findings are discussed within the context of how it may be fruitful for researchers to explore how hope is related to everyday academic practice.
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Incentives in religious performance: a stochastic dominance approach
Teresa García-Muñoz
Judgment and Decision Making, April 2010, Pages 176–181
Abstract:
Using a stochastic dominance approach in an international dataset of about 10,000 Catholic subjects, we show that incentives (based on absolute belief) play a crucial role in religious practice (church attendance and prayer). Furthermore, we find that when both positive (heaven) and negative (hell) incentives are available, the former have a much stronger effect than the latter. The results are confirmed using Kolmogorov-Smirnov tests.
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Remembering to Execute a Goal: Sleep on It!
Michael Scullin & Mark McDaniel
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Remembering to execute deferred goals (prospective memory) is a ubiquitous memory challenge, and one that is often not successfully accomplished. Could sleeping after goal encoding promote later execution? We evaluated this possibility by instructing participants to execute a prospective memory goal after a short delay (20 min), a 12-hr wake delay, or a 12-hr sleep delay. Goal execution declined after the 12-hr wake delay relative to the short delay. In contrast, goal execution was relatively preserved after the 12-hr sleep delay relative to the short delay. The sleep-enhanced goal execution was not accompanied by a decline in performance of an ongoing task in which the prospective memory goal was embedded, which suggests that the effect was not a consequence of attentional resources being reallocated from the ongoing task to the prospective memory goal. Our results suggest that consolidation processes active during sleep increase the probability that a goal will be spontaneously retrieved and executed.
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Emma Lydall, Gary Gilmour & Dominic Dwyer
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
The effort justification phenomenon, in which greater value is given to rewards that require more effort to obtain, is frequently explained in terms of cognitive dissonance (Festinger & Carlsmith, 1959). Here, we employed a novel combination of operant and lick analysis techniques to show that rats place more value on a sucrose reward when it follows high effort than when the same reward follows low effort. This is the first demonstration of a direct analogue of the effort justification phenomenon in non-human animals. As the behavior of rats is normally considered in terms of relatively simple mechanisms, the current results question the need for complex cognitive accounts for the effort justification phenomenon (in rats or humans). As an alternative, we examine the possibility that high effort produces an aversive state that enhances reward value by a process of contrast.
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Information About Low Participation in Cancer Screening Demotivates Other People
Monika Sieverding, Sarah Decker & Friederike Zimmermann
Psychological Science, forthcoming
"Health education campaigns that aim to increase rates of attendance at preventive health screenings often present information about low participation rates. An example from the United States reads, 'A new survey...found that 89% of women still do not think or are not sure that they are at risk for infection with the virus'...The results of this study demonstrate a clear demotivating effect of low-prevalence information on men who have never undergone a cancer screening. In designing health education campaigns, one should be very cautious in using low prevalence rates to motivate people, because this information might result in a boomerang effect: 'When so few people engage in this behavior, it might not be a sensible thing to do!'"
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Exercising self-control increases approach motivation
Brandon Schmeichel, Condy Harmon-Jones & Eddie Harmon-Jones
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, July 2010, Pages 162-173
Abstract:
The present research tested the hypothesis that exercising self-control causes an increase in approach motivation. Study 1 found that exercising (vs. not exercising) self-control increases self-reported approach motivation. Study 2a identified a behavior — betting on low-stakes gambles — that is correlated with approach motivation but is relatively uncorrelated with self-control, and Study 2b observed that exercising self-control temporarily increases this behavior. Last, Study 3 found that exercising self-control facilitates the perception of a reward-relevant symbol (i.e., a dollar sign) but not a reward-irrelevant symbol (i.e., a percent sign). Altogether, these results support the hypothesis that exercising self-control temporarily increases approach motivation. Failures of self-control that follow from prior efforts at self-control (i.e., ego depletion) may be explained in part by increased approach motivation.
----------------------- Letting Good Opportunities Pass Us By: Examining the Role of Mind-Set during Goal Pursuit Julia Belyavsky Bayuk, Chris Janiszewski & Robyn Leboeuf Journal of Consumer Research, forthcoming Abstract: It is generally accepted that forming an implementation intention promotes goal pursuit and achievement. Forming an implementation intention encourage people to develop a plan, to prepare for events that allow for the execution of the plan, and to efficiently responds to these opportunities. Yet, forming an implementation intention may not be universally beneficial. An implementation intention may encourage the use of means that are part of the plan but may discourage the use of efficacious means that are not part of the plan. Four experiments show that forming an implementation intention decreases the likelihood of responding to goal-directed, out-of-plan behaviors when a person is in a concrete mind-set. Limitations, implications, and directions for future research are discussed.
----------------------- The Unconscious Will: How the Pursuit of Goals Operates Outside of Conscious Awareness Ruud Custers & Henk Aarts Science, 2 July 2010, Pages 47-50 Abstract: People often act in order to realize desired outcomes, or goals. Although behavioral science recognizes that people can skillfully pursue goals without consciously attending to their behavior once these goals are set, conscious will is considered to be the starting point of goal pursuit. Indeed, when we decide to work hard on a task, it feels as if that conscious decision is the first and foremost cause of our behavior. That is, we are likely to say, if asked, that the decision to act produced the actions themselves. Recent discoveries, however, challenge this casual status of conscious will. They demonstrate that under some conditions, actions are initiated even though we are unconscious of the goals to be attained or their motivating effect on our behavior. Here we analyze how goal pursuit can possibly operate unconsciously. ----------------------- Climbing the Goal Ladder: How Upcoming Actions Increase Level of Aspiration Minjung Koo & Ayelet Fishbach Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, July 2010, Pages 1-13 Abstract: Pursuing a series of progressive (e.g., professional) goals that form a goal ladder often leads to a trade-off between moving up to a more advanced level and repeating the same goal level. This article investigates how monitoring one's current goal in terms of remaining actions versus completed actions influences the desire to move up the goal ladder. The authors propose that a focus on remaining (vs. completed) actions increases the motivation to move up to a more advanced level, whereas the focus on completed (vs. remaining) actions increases the satisfaction derived from the present level. They find support for these predictions across several goal ladders, ranging from academic and professional ladders to simple, experimental tasks. They further find that individuals strategically attend to information about remaining (vs. completed) actions to prepare to move up the goal ladder. ----------------------- Shannon Zentall & Bradley Morris Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, October 2010, Pages 155-163 Abstract: Previous research has demonstrated that generic praise (“good drawer”) is related to children giving up after failure because failure implies the lack of a critical trait (e.g., drawing ability). Conversely, nongeneric praise (“good job drawing”) is related to mastery motivation because it implies that success is related to effort. Yet children may receive a mixture of these praise types (i.e., inconsistent praise), the effects of which are unclear. We tested how inconsistent praise influenced two components of motivation: self-evaluation and persistence. Kindergarteners (N = 135) were randomly assigned to one of five conditions in which consistency of praise type was varied. After two failure scenarios, children reported self-evaluations and persistence. Results indicated that more nongeneric praise related linearly to greater motivation, yet self-evaluation and persistence were impacted differently by inconsistent praise types. Hearing even a small amount of generic praise reduced persistence, whereas hearing a small amount of nongeneric praise preserved self-evaluation. ----------------------- Raymond Perry, Robert Stupnisky, Nathan Hall, Judith Chipperfield & Bernard Weiner Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, June 2010, Pages 668-700 Abstract: Transitions to new achievement settings are often accompanied by unfamiliar learning conditions wherein individuals experience unanticipated failures and engage in dysfunctional explanatory thinking. To counter these developments, attributional retraining (AR) was presented to 457 first-year students following an initial test in a two-semester course. A Semester 1 AR treatment (no, yes) and initial-test-performance (low, average, high) 2 × 3 quasi-experimental design was used to assess Semester 2 attributions, emotions, and performance outcomes. AR encouraged all students to endorse controllable attributions and de-emphasize uncontrollable attributions in explaining achievement outcomes in Semester 2. For low- and average-initial-performance students, AR improved subsequent in-class tests, final course grades, and first-year GPAs. Higher initial-test-performance was related to positive emotions and better achievement in Semester 2. The discussion focused on the implications of AR for attributional thinking in unfamiliar achievement settings. ----------------------- Splitting Motivation: Unilateral Effects of Subliminal Incentives Liane Schmidt, Stefano Palminteri, Gilles Lafargue & Mathias Pessiglione Psychological Science, forthcoming Abstract: Motivation is generally understood to denote the strength of a person’s desire to attain a goal. Here we challenge this view of motivation as a person-level concept, in a study that targeted subliminal incentives to only one half of the human brain. Participants in the study squeezed a handgrip to win the greatest fraction possible of each subliminal incentive, which materialized as a coin image flashed in one visual hemifield. Motivation effects (i.e., more force exerted when the incentive was higher) were observed only for the hand controlled by the stimulated brain hemisphere. These results show that in the absence of conscious control, one brain hemisphere, and hence one side of the body, can be motivated independently of the other.