Placing motivation again at the heart of psychology: Commentary on Dweck’s contributions.

After communicators have tuned a message about a target person’s behaviors to their audience’s attitude, their recall of the target’s behaviors is often evaluatively consistent with their audience’s attitude. This audience-tuning effect on recall has been explained as resulting from the communicators’ creation of a shared reality with the audience, which helps communicators to achieve epistemic needs for confident judgments and knowledge. Drawing on the ROAR (Relevance Of A Representation) model, we argue that shared reality increases the cognitive accessibility of information consistent (vs. inconsistent) with the audience’s attitude, due to enhanced truth relevance of this information. We tested this prediction with a novel reaction-time task in three experiments employing the saying-is-believing paradigm. Faster reactions to audience-consistent (vs. audience-inconsistent) information were found for trait information but not for behavioral information. Thus, audience-congruent accessibility bias emerged at the level at which impressions and judgments of other persons are typically organized. Consistent with a shared-reality account, the audience-consistent accessibility bias was correlated with perceived shared reality about the target person and with epistemic trust in the audience. Among possible explanations, the findings are best reconciled with the view that the creation of shared reality with an audience triggers basic and" automatic"(spontaneous, low-level) cognitive mechanisms that facilitate the retrieval of audience-congruent (vs. audience-incongruent) trait information about a target person.

Basic and Applied Social Psychology

When postgraduate students join their program, they establish commonalities of inner states (feelings, beliefs, concerns) with members of different, intertwined groups. Are those commonalities perceived as distinct based on group type? If so, which type affects students the most? We address these questions leveraging the shared reality construct: the perceived commonality of inner states with others. In two empirical, longitudinal studies, we survey graduate students as they establish shared realities with small teams, their class cohort (cluster), and the broader school community. We show that each shared reality with different groups is perceived distinctively, and the one shared with cohort members has the strongest relationship with students’ engagement with the program. We explore a shared reality antecedent and discuss interventions.

Journal of Consumer Psychology

Variety‐seeking research has examined antecedents in terms of contextual factors and individual differences. However, it does not consider the interaction of individual difference factors such as regulatory focus (promotion vs. prevention) and regulatory mode (locomotion vs. assessment) to predict variety‐seeking. Drawing on regulatory fit theory, this study introduces a new kind of regulatory fit based on the interaction between regulatory focus and mode (i.e., regulatory focus–mode fit), thereby extending previous work examining fit based on either regulatory focus or regulatory mode in isolation. Results from five studies, including field data from 10,547 music app consumers (text analysis), two preregistered studies, and two online experiments, show that regulatory focus–mode fit (vs. non‐fit) decreases variety‐seeking. Engagement and attitude certainty serially mediate regulatory focus–mode fit effects. Findings …

Journal of Consumer Psychology

How can social media managers engage consumers to share posts with others? Extending regulatory mode theory, we demonstrate that high construal levels enable the integration of regulatory mode complementarity orientations, resulting in engagement and shares. Regulatory mode complementarity refers to the combination of high assessment (i.e., the motivation to “be right” by critically evaluating options) and high locomotion (i.e., the motivation to “act” by moving toward a goal). Specifically, this research proposes that an abstract (vs. concrete) construal allows these two orientations to work together, resulting in regulatory fit. Three text analysis field studies on marketer‐ and consumer‐generated Facebook and Twitter posts show that construal–regulatory mode fit increases social media sharing. Three follow‐up studies then show generalizability, establish causality, and demonstrate the role of engagement as …

The Journal of Positive Psychology

Research focusing on motivation has consistently identified changes in motivational emphases as individuals age. However, whether these same patterns exist with respect to more domain-general conceptualizations of these motives has not yet been examined. Furthermore, researchers have not determined whether these differences in motivations across age groups are associated with differences in different measures of well-being. Using three cross-sectional samples, we examine the relative importance individuals place on different motivational domains across different age groups. In Studies 1a and 1b, we show that age is negatively associated with growth motive importance, but is unassociated with security, control, or epistemic motive importance. In Study 2, we show that older adults who do not show this de-emphasis of growth motives have significantly lower life satisfaction and lower self-reported …

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

Why are some people more successful than others? In addition to individual factors (eg self-control), research has recently suggested that the quality of people’s interpersonal relationships is crucial for success. Successful people do not just like and feel close to instrumental objects (eg, study material, the gym), they also like and feel close to instrumental others (IOs; people who make goal success more likely). Yet instrumental people have one crucially distinct feature that instrumental objects do not: A mind of their own. We propose that while a growing body of work suggests that the sense of closeness to IOs (others who make goal success more likely) is crucial for goal success, prior work has not examined how the sense of the quality of people’s relationships with IOs, and therefore goal success, likely depends on their ability to “merge minds” with them, experiencing both the goal and the world at large (ie …

The Leadership Quarterly

Leaders today must motivate followers to engage in organizational change. Although leader change visions are considered a key motivator, limited research and theory explore how leaders’ use of different change visions influences the extent to which followers are motivated to pursue organizational change goals. Building on issue selling and sensemaking literatures, we offer an expanded typology of leader change visions that more fully represents how leaders can depict the future state of their organization to create a case for change. We further propose a framework that explains how and under what conditions leader change visions motivate followers—individually and collectively—to support change efforts. To explain how followers respond to change initiatives, we highlight the role of regulatory construal fit—the degree to which leader change visions fit with followers’ understanding of the threats or …

Functional Ecology

Animals are a critical component of biogeochemical cycles. While animal mediated fluxes of nutrients and energy have received considerable attention, the impacts of these fluxes on microbial community structure and function are comparatively understudied. Here, we investigated if freshwater mussel influences on biogeochemical cycling in stream sediment are accompanied by changes in sediment microbial community composition and ecoenzymatic activity, and if these relationships change under different nutrient regimes. We predicted that mussel effects on ecosystem function are reflected by modified sediment microbial communities. We hypothesized that if changes in either sediment ecoenzymatic function or microbial community composition are driven by mussel‐derived nutrient amendments, we should see muted changes in microbial community assemblages or function when a given nutrient is …

Effective communication that encourages patient participation and maximizes rehabilitation outcomes is a primary goal in physical therapy (PT) education. A framework that provides insight into individual conceptualization of rehabilitation goals and strategies is Regulatory Focus Theory, which examines motivation stemming from two self-regulatory systems: promotion (ie, concerns with nurturance, progress, and attaining gains vs. non-gains) and prevention (ie, concerns with security, safety, and maintaining non-losses vs. losses). We distributed questionnaires assessing promotion (vs. prevention) predominance both personally and in a rehabilitation context, as well as sociodemographic data, to 116 Doctor of Physical Therapy students. On average, students were promotion (vs. prevention) predominant in their personal lives, with predominance scores varying as a function of sex. Males exhibited a predominant personal promotion focus, while females showed a relative balance between personal promotion versus prevention concerns. In contrast, when framed as working with patients in a rehabilitation context, females demonstrated a promotion focus, whereas promotion and prevention concerns were balanced in males. As suggested by these differences, we found that males and females demonstrated significant shifts in regulatory focus in a goal-setting rehabilitation (vs. personal) context in opposing directions, with females becoming more promotion-predominant and males becoming more prevention-predominant. Additionally, regulatory focus in a rehabilitation context varied as a function of students’ race/ethnicity, reason for choosing PT …

Journal of Advertising

While prior research has gleaned important insight into consumers’ social media engagement, an important literature-based tension exists that warrants further attention. On the one hand, females are increasingly empowered (e.g., through their rising spending power). On the other hand, advertising-based gender stereotypes persist, thus limiting female consumers’ empowerment and decelerating advertising-based inclusion, equity, and diversity. Deploying regulatory mode theory, we propose that the adoption of a locomotion (vs. assessment) orientation, which emphasizes the initiation and continuation of the consumer’s goal pursuit (vs. focusing on the individual’s arrival at the “right” decision), respectively, can be leveraged to empower female consumers and boost their engagement with social media–based advertising. These predictions are tested across field studies 1a–1b and experiments 2–3. These …

Originally published in 1986, this book grew out of a symposium held in 1981 at the University of Toronto on physical appearance as a determinant of personality and social behavior. There is little doubt that one’s appearance has some impact on the way one is perceived and treated; and presumably, owing to the socially reflected nature of the self, one’s personality likewise will be affected by one’s appearance. The questions arising from these basic observations and assumptions are many, and the expert contributors were invited to discuss their research on some of the implications of individual differences in appearance as they ramify into personality and social interaction. The chapters in this volume are the outcome of those discussions and cover the areas of facial attractiveness; physique; impact on social behavior, and deviance. Still a topic of interest to this day, this book can now be read and enjoyed in its historical context.

Social Cognition

Our study explores how communicating with audiences who hold opposite opinions about a target person can lead to a biased recall of the target's behaviors depending on whom a shared reality is created with. By extending the standard “saying-is-believing” paradigm to the case of two audiences with opposite attitudes toward a target person, we found that communicators evaluatively tune their message to the attitude of each audience. Still, their later recall of the target's behavior is biased toward the audience's attitude only for the audience with whom they created a shared reality. Shared reality creation was manipulated by receiving feedback that, based on the communicator's message, an audience was either able (success) or unable (failure) to successfully identify the target person, with the former creating a shared reality. These results highlight the importance of shared reality creation for subsequent recall …

Animals can have large impacts on how ecosystems function, from influencing population dynamics of other plant or animal species, to modifying hydrogeological flow dynamics. One ecosystem function that has received widespread attention is the biogeochemical transformation of key nutrients required for primary production. Freshwater mussels are benthic species that in dense communities, act as biogeochemical hotspots with landscape-level impacts. Mussels can cycle nutrients through their own metabolism, but the observed changes in ecosystem-scale nutrient transformations are also largely influenced by microbial metabolism. My dissertation examined the complex interactions between freshwater mussels and environmental microbial communities and how these interactions shape nutrient dynamics. Then, I investigated how scientists can effectively communicate their research in ways that promote participation in the broader scientific community. Chapter one explored microbial communities associated with mussels in discrete, but proximate microhabitats in a southern US river. Mussel microbiomes (shell and biodeposits), were less diverse than those in surface and subsurface sediments. Mussel abundance was a significant predictor of sediment microbial community composition. Mussel species richness and distance between sample sites were not significant predictors of microbial community composition. These data suggest that mussels and local habitat conditions that change dynamically along streams, such as discharge, water turnover, and canopy cover, work in tandem to influence environmental microbial community …

This chapter deals with such personal experience variables as degree of familiarity and mode of acquisition of social knowledge. It considers the impact of degree of personal experience on personal information processing. The chapter examines the role of acquisition in social cognition. It provides preliminary attempt to overcome this limitation by delineating a number of factors that may play an important role in the acquisition of social categories and expectations. It provides a commentary on some of the emerging trends in social cognition, it is not our intent to offer a detailed and exhaustive review of the literature in these and related areas. Beliefs about particular people or social groups can be induced through knowledge of instances or directly acquired as a proposition. Behavioral instances can also be concentrated or dispersed across situations. Their inclusion in models of social cognition will not be …

We examined how living up to “societal standards” and how living up to one’s “self standards” affects individuals’ well-being. Based on Regulatory Focus Theory, we predicted that life satisfaction of “promotion-focused” individuals would be most affected by attainment of self standards and that life satisfaction of “prevention-focused” individuals would be most influenced by societal standards attainment. 416 participants in two studies completed measures of wellbeing and regulatory focus. They listed standards that matter to them and standards that matter totheir society and rated the extent to which they manage to attain these standards. Attainment of both self and society standards uniquely contributed to life satisfaction. High promotion predominant individuals’ life satisfaction was relatively more influenced by self standards attainment, whereas low promotion-predominant individuals’ life satisfaction was relatively more influenced by society standards attainment. The findings suggest that some individuals maypay higher prices if they “walk to their own drumbeat”.

Motivation Science

People benefit when others react enthusiastically to their good news, a process known as capitalization. However, little is known regarding individual differences that predict who responds enthusiastically, and how capitalization might benefit responders. Drawing on regulatory focus theory, we hypothesize that responders with a stronger promotion predominance, who emphasize ideals and pursue goals eagerly,(a) provide more enthusiastic (active-constructive) responding following their partners’ capitalization attempts, and (b) experience positive capitalization outcomes, namely higher perceptions of interaction quality and greater positive mood. Findings from 1 correlational study (Study 1) and 2 dyadic studies (Studies 2–3) supported these hypotheses. These results are among the first to consider the role of motivation in the context of capitalization interactions and reveal important benefits associated with …

Originally published in 1981, this volume presents papers from the first Ontario Symposium on Personality and Social Psychology held at the University of Western Ontario from August 25-27, 1978. The general theme of the symposium was social cognition. The chapters have been grouped into two major parts. Chapters 1-5 focus on the implications of cognitive structures for social cognition, with particular emphasis on the nature of social schemata and the organization of social information. Chapters 6-11 focus on the consequences for social cognition of various cognitive processes and mechanisms, including verbal and nonverbal communicative processes, category accessibility, salience and selective attention, hypothesis-testing, and self-centered biases. Chapter 12 comments on the general perspectives taken in the previous chapters and suggests some additional directions for future consideration. Today it can be read and enjoyed in its historical context.

Frontiers in Microbiology

Microbiomes are increasingly recognized as widespread regulators of function from individual organism to ecosystem scales. However, the manner in which animals influence the structure and function of environmental microbiomes has received considerably less attention. Using a comparative field study, we investigated the relationship between freshwater mussel microbiomes and environmental microbiomes. We used two focal species of unionid mussels, Amblema plicata and Actinonaias ligamentina, with distinct behavioral and physiological characteristics. Mussel microbiomes, those of the shell and biodeposits, were less diverse than both surface and subsurface sediment microbiomes. Mussel abundance was a significant predictor of sediment microbial community composition, but mussel species richness was not. Our data suggest that local habitat conditions which change dynamically along streams, such as discharge, water turnover, and canopy cover, work in tandem to influence environmental microbial community assemblages at discreet rather than landscape scales. Further, mussel burrowing activity and mussel shells may provide habitat for microbial communities critical to nutrient cycling in these systems.

One of the earliest phenomena addressed by a self-consciously cognitive social psychology—and one that continues to be an important research focus for contemporary cognitive social psychologists—is the process by which we form impressions of others. This chapter discusses a series of studies of interactions in which one party attempted to deceive the other. The dependent variable measure is what we call the Detection Index. It consists of the sum of the truthfulness ratings for those questions on which the interviewee was answering truthfully minus the sum of the ratings for those answers on which the interviewee was lying. Attractiveness is typically considered a biasing factor and was included because we expected it to be related to our judges’ ratings—predicting that attractive interviewees would be judged more truthful. It should go without saying that our attribution explanation of the effects of pitch variation …