Goals and Self-regulation
Overview
- Social motives
- Goals
- Self-regulation
After this lecture you can (name and) explain…
- The main social motives
- ‘Goals’ and the different phases of goal-directed behaviour
- Automatic goal-persuit, including goal-inconsistent automaticity
- The concept op self-regulation, and regulatory focus theory in particular
Why motivation?
- Cognition - motivation - emotion
- Focus today: motivation and social cognition
- Goals ←→ Information processing
Motivation
- Drive
- Hunger, sex, etc. (less central here)
- Motive
- What sets behaviour (and cognition) into motion
- Goal
- Cognitive representation of a desired end-state
- Self-regulation
- How people control and direct their behavior
Social motives
Five core motives
1. Beloning to something
a. Probably most fundamental human social need. If you threaten
this need, you also threaten other needs, like sense of control, self-esteem.
b. Family, friends, groups
c. Contributes to physical and mental health
d. Being alone/socially isolated is aversive
e. Ostracism, social exclusion. Cyberball paradigm. If you know
it’s a computer, you still feel ostracised.
f. Consequences: people feel stressed, pain, strong emotions.
Attempts to regain connections, or they react with aggression. Which
behaviour occurs depends on motive. Aggression is more likely to occur when
‘control’ is threatened.
2. Understanding
a. Naive scientists/consistency seekers.
b. People need (socially shared) sense of meaning
c. Meaning threats; Absurdis humour, reversed coloured playing
cards;
, d. Consequences of meaning violations: punishing wold-view
threatening others, they also show greater search for meaning.
e. Artificial grammar paradigm; people who had their meaning
threatened, performed better at detecting artificial grammer
3. Control (we want to control our outcomes and the social environments we’re
in)
a. People need to feel some control over the (social) world
around them
b. Control manipulation; write about situation in which you had
low/high control
c. Snowy picture task > When people lacked control, they had a
higher need for structure and perceived illusory patterns. They try to regain
control.
d. Power is related to control, the power approach model; when
people are in power, they become more activated in behaviour, they are
stronger in positive actions, they take more risk. Promotion focus. When
power is threatened, the opposite happens (gehad in groepsdynamica).
Prevention focus.
4. Positive self-image
a. Later lecture
5. Trust in ingroup
a. Later lecture
People have a strong need to belong, understand and to some extent control the world
around them. These motives are social in nature. The power of these motives is especially
well-illustrated when they are threatened.
Why is motivation important for social cognition?
Dual-process models
Systematic processing (slow, but accurate)
Automatic processing (quick and dirty)
Impression-formation Continuum
You could, on one end, stereotype a person. On the other hand, you could individualise a
person.
- Stereotyping - default
- Individuation dependent on cognitive capacity and motivation for accurate
impression.
Influence of Motivation
Participants do task with former psychiatrich patient
- Read partner’s personal description
- Then do creativity task together
- Describe partner
Outcome-dependence manipulation
- (In)Dependent on partner for reward for task
Results: subjects in the dependent condition
Overview
- Social motives
- Goals
- Self-regulation
After this lecture you can (name and) explain…
- The main social motives
- ‘Goals’ and the different phases of goal-directed behaviour
- Automatic goal-persuit, including goal-inconsistent automaticity
- The concept op self-regulation, and regulatory focus theory in particular
Why motivation?
- Cognition - motivation - emotion
- Focus today: motivation and social cognition
- Goals ←→ Information processing
Motivation
- Drive
- Hunger, sex, etc. (less central here)
- Motive
- What sets behaviour (and cognition) into motion
- Goal
- Cognitive representation of a desired end-state
- Self-regulation
- How people control and direct their behavior
Social motives
Five core motives
1. Beloning to something
a. Probably most fundamental human social need. If you threaten
this need, you also threaten other needs, like sense of control, self-esteem.
b. Family, friends, groups
c. Contributes to physical and mental health
d. Being alone/socially isolated is aversive
e. Ostracism, social exclusion. Cyberball paradigm. If you know
it’s a computer, you still feel ostracised.
f. Consequences: people feel stressed, pain, strong emotions.
Attempts to regain connections, or they react with aggression. Which
behaviour occurs depends on motive. Aggression is more likely to occur when
‘control’ is threatened.
2. Understanding
a. Naive scientists/consistency seekers.
b. People need (socially shared) sense of meaning
c. Meaning threats; Absurdis humour, reversed coloured playing
cards;
, d. Consequences of meaning violations: punishing wold-view
threatening others, they also show greater search for meaning.
e. Artificial grammar paradigm; people who had their meaning
threatened, performed better at detecting artificial grammer
3. Control (we want to control our outcomes and the social environments we’re
in)
a. People need to feel some control over the (social) world
around them
b. Control manipulation; write about situation in which you had
low/high control
c. Snowy picture task > When people lacked control, they had a
higher need for structure and perceived illusory patterns. They try to regain
control.
d. Power is related to control, the power approach model; when
people are in power, they become more activated in behaviour, they are
stronger in positive actions, they take more risk. Promotion focus. When
power is threatened, the opposite happens (gehad in groepsdynamica).
Prevention focus.
4. Positive self-image
a. Later lecture
5. Trust in ingroup
a. Later lecture
People have a strong need to belong, understand and to some extent control the world
around them. These motives are social in nature. The power of these motives is especially
well-illustrated when they are threatened.
Why is motivation important for social cognition?
Dual-process models
Systematic processing (slow, but accurate)
Automatic processing (quick and dirty)
Impression-formation Continuum
You could, on one end, stereotype a person. On the other hand, you could individualise a
person.
- Stereotyping - default
- Individuation dependent on cognitive capacity and motivation for accurate
impression.
Influence of Motivation
Participants do task with former psychiatrich patient
- Read partner’s personal description
- Then do creativity task together
- Describe partner
Outcome-dependence manipulation
- (In)Dependent on partner for reward for task
Results: subjects in the dependent condition
