chap. 6

Question 1

How does competence elicit behaviours?

Answer 1

• From birth, we seek out new information, set and strive for abstract goals, and avoid situations in which we feel incompetent
• Infants demonstrate a natural curiosity toward new objects
• As we grow, this eventually turns into a psychological motive

Question 2

How does competence produce positive outcomes?

Answer 2

• Feeling competent is linked to many positive benefits
• People who feel highly competent have improved physical health and mental health
• Benefits from competence often only occur if the individual also feels autonomy
  –> p.ex: if you perform well in a game which relied on having control, effort and ability, you would gain a sense of competency from your win
  –> but, when you win a game that relies on luck, competency isn’t necessarily fulfilled

Question 3

How is competence universal in all cultures?

Answer 3

• It is equally valued in every culture, but the sense of the word is different
• Eastern cultures are more likely than Western cultures to value competence within group-based domains

Question 4

True or false: There is variability in the expression of competence.

Answer 4

True: There are different views of competency.

Question 5

Give some examples of how people view and value competency differently.

Answer 5

• Some people are more driven to fulfill their competence need than others
• Some people adopt the goal to improve their competence, while others adopt to goal to prove their competence
• People who think competencies are something they are born with respond differently from people who think their competencies are something they had to work hard to achieve
• People who perceive themselves to be competent respond differently from people who see themselves as incompetent

Question 6

In relation to the variability in the expression of competence, people who prefer ___ goals are not concerned about making mistakes and want to learn new things.

Answer 6

Learning
–> p.ex: more concerned about mastering the material

Question 7

In relation to the variability of competence, people who prefer ___ goals are concerned with looking competent.

Answer 7

Performance
–> these people are more concerned about getting a good grade

Question 8

Explain the 2x2 goal taxonomy.

Answer 8

• This graph shows the direction in which you are approaching or avoiding a goal
  –> approaching success vs. avoiding failure
• Performance approach: want to appear competent by achieving success
• Performance avoidance: want to appear competent by avoiding failure
  → least beneficial
• Learning approach: want to approach success by master the content
  → most beneficial
• Learning avoidance: want to avoid failure by learning and gaining knowledge

Question 9

What are the 2 mindsets in Dweck’s theory of implicit beliefs?

Answer 9

1) Entity theorists (fixed mindset)
2) Incremental theorists (growth mindset)

Question 10

According to Dweck, how would you describe an entity theorist, or someone with a fixed mindset?

Answer 10

• Competence is doing something well right away without effort; belief that traits and abilities do not change
• Entity people adopt performance goals rather than learning goals
• Will likely walk away after a failure
• This idea that whatever you’re doing, you can’t get better at it, where you’re at is where you’ll stay
• Worry the most about how they’re judged

Question 11

According to Dweck, how would you describe an incremental theorist, or someone with a flexible mindset?

Answer 11

• work hard and improve over time
• Adopt learning goals rather than performance goals
• Incremental people increase efforts after failure
• Taking the time to practice allows you to grow and develop the new skills
  → worry the most about how they can further improve and learn

Question 12

How does the type of praise received influence entity and incremental beliefs?

Answer 12

1) Effort (growth mindset)
–> children who are praised for their effort develop a growth mindset (process related)
–> p.ex: “that’s a good score, you must have tried really hard”

2) Intelligence (fixed mindset)
–> children who are praised for their ability develop a fixed mindset
–> p.ex: “that’s a good score, you must be great at this”

Question 13

Define self-efficacy

Answer 13

• The perception or belief about our ability to accomplish a particular task
• Your personal belief at how good you are at handling certain situations

Question 14

What did Bandura show about self-efficacy?

Answer 14

• Showed that people who have higher self-efficacy tend to overperform those with low self-efficacy in many different domains of life

Question 15

How can self-efficacy cause a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy?

Answer 15

• The greater our self-efficacy, the more we believe we have the skills necessary to successfully accomplish something

Question 16

Our level of competence is determined by… (2 things)

Answer 16

our abilities and our perceived capabilities (self-efficacy)

Question 17

Attributions play a high role in self-efficacy: ___ and ___ attributions impact our self-efficacy beliefs

Answer 17

Internal and stable
–> when we attribute something to an external attributions, it has little effect on our self-efficacy because it removes our responsibility to the situation

Question 18

What is flow?

Answer 18

• Subjective state in which people feel completely absorbed and focused on an activity (being in the zone)
• Self efficacy is important to achieve a state of flow

Question 19

What causes flow?

Answer 19

• High perceived skill + High task demand
  –> demand: how much effort you have to exert to achieve the task
  –> skill: how capable you think you are in the task

Question 20

What are the 4 states a person can be in when combining demand and skill?

Answer 20

1) Flow = High perceived skill + High task demand
2) Anxiety = Low perceived skill + High task demand
3) Apathy = Low perceived skill + Low task demand
4) Boredom = High perceived skill + Low task demand

Question 21

Define the self-concept.

Answer 21

• Who you think you are, how you understand yourself to be
  –> p.ex: if you consider yourself to be athletic, you’ll be more motivated to sign up for sports
• Individual’s collection of self-knowledge
• Competencies form the basis for the sense of self

Question 22

Define goal fusion (in relation to the role of self). What occurs when it is high vs. low?

Answer 22

• The extent to which a goal is perceived to be integrated into a person’s self-concept
• High: People feel one with their goal
  –> p.ex: people who are joggers
• Low: It’s just something they do
  –> p.ex: people who jog

Question 23

True or false: When we feel fused with a goal (high goal fusion), successes and failures with that goal have little impact because it’s not that valuable to us.

Answer 23

False: This occurs when we do not feel fused with a goal (low goal fusion)

Question 24

Define self-esteem.

Answer 24

• How favourably or unfavourably people evaluate themselves
• The emotion it brings out
• Considered to be a major motivator of human behaviour

Question 25

What determines self-esteem?

Answer 25

• Contingencies of self-worth
  –> These are the things that make you feel good about yourself
• According to this model, the impact that an event has on one’s self-esteem depends on the relevance of that event to one’s contingencies of
  self-worth (i.e., how you feel about yourself in a situation depends on how much that situation matters to you)
• The more people base their self-esteem on a particular domain (e.g., math, athletics, physical appearance), the more their self-worth is contingent on that domain
  –> p.ex: getting good grades makes you feel good about yourself because you base self-esteem on academics

Question 26

Explain self-comparison theory.

Answer 26

• Suggests that we only know who we are and what we are capable of by comparing ourselves to others
• How well others around us d will impact how we feel about ourselves
• We make decisions of athletic ability or intelligence by comparing ourselves to others

Question 27

Name the 4 self-evaluation motives

Answer 27

1) Self-assessment
2) Self-verification
3) Self-enhancement
4) Self-improvement

Question 28

What is self-assessment?

Answer 28

• The motivation to obtain an accurate evaluation of one’s abilities and competencies
• looking for information regardless of whether it’s positive or negative

Question 29

What is self-verification?

Answer 29

• Sometimes, we engage in a behaviour to prove that we are good or bad at it; seek out friends who validate our self-opinions; positive or negative

Question 30

What is self-enhancement?

Answer 30

• The motivation to enhance the positive aspects and decrease the negative aspects of our self-concept; ONLY seeking the positive
• as much as we want our confirmation to be accurate, sometimes we just want to feel good about ourselves to uphold a positive self-concept

Question 31

What is self-improvement?

Answer 31

• We constantly seek self-improvement in jobs, school, and relationships
• When you’re able to acknowledge that maybe you’re not as good as you could be, so you want to take the steps to improve yourself, to grow and learn

Question 32

True or false: Self-improvement can lead to a feeling of discouragement, leading to low self-esteem.

Answer 32

True

Question 33

We strategically use internal and external attributions to maintain overly positive evaluations. ___ attributions are accorded to failures, while ___ are accorded to successes.

Answer 33

External; internal
–> It softens the blow to our self-esteem and allows us to maintain a sense of competency

Question 34

What are the 3 types of reactions to loss of competence?

Answer 34

1) Self-serving attributional bias
2) Self-handicapping (self-destruction)
3) Excuse making

Question 35

What is self-serving attributional bias? Give an example

Answer 35

• people tend to make internal attributions for their successes and external attributions for their failures
  → p.ex: student gets an A because they worked hard for it
  → p.ex: student gets an F because the professor made the test too hard
• This allows us to maintain a sense of competency

Question 36

What is self-handicapping (self-destruction)? Give an example.

Answer 36

• By creating an obstacle that guarantees failure, people can blame the poor outcome on the external cause and not blame themselves
• People are more likely to use this strategy when they expect failure
• Occurs BEFORE the outcome
  → p.ex: a student who may not know what to write for an assignment will push back the time they start writing; thus when they do poorly, they can blame it on the fact that they didn’t have enough time or didn’t start early enough (they’re then able to blame it on the context)

Question 37

What is excuse making? Give an example.

Answer 37

• An attempt to shift attributions for a negative outcome from internal causes to external causes
  → p.ex: didn’t do well on an exam because it was too hot in the room, not quiet enough
• It protects self-esteem and makes others less likely to blame us for our failures
• Self-handicapping occurs before the event, excuse making occurs AFTER

Question 38

Explain the need for closure in relation to decision making.

Answer 38

• It is the motivation to find an answer to an ambiguous situation
• This motivation is enhanced by the perceived benefits of obtaining closure (e.g., the increased ability to predict the world)
  → sense of security and predictability in our lives
• This motivation is also enhanced by the perceived costs of lacking closure (e.g., such as missing deadlines)
  → when we’re not able to relieve the discomfort, we avoid the situation (procrastination)

Question 39

People with a high need for closure are more likely to…

Answer 39

• Rely on underlying personality dispositions (rather than situational pressures) to explain another person’s behaviour
  –> tend to explain why someone acts a certain way by saying “that’s just how they are” (quickly make a decision and move on)
• Judge people based on first impressions
  –> p.ex: if they meet someone for the first time who appears more shy or reserved, they’ll make the decision that they’re unfriendly even if they show otherwise later on
• Use stereotypes: simple general beliefs about groups of people
  –> base their knowledge on others by stereotypes instead of taking the time to consider the person’s individual traits

Question 40

According to Kruglanski & Webster, need for closure exerts its effects via two general tendencies, what are they?

Answer 40

1) Urgency tendency: The inclination to attain closure as quickly as possible to decrease discomfort; priorities the speed rather than the thoroughness of the decision
2) Permanence tendency: The tendency to maintain closure for as long as possible; once they make a decision they try to resist thinking of the decision any further for fear that they realize they made the wrong choice; to maintain an illusion of confidence

Question 41

What is belief crystallization?

Answer 41

Belief crystallization refers to the process by which a person’s beliefs about someone or something come together. It’s when all of the information you’ve collected over time comes together in your mind to form an opinion about someone/something

Question 42

Those with a high need for closure are frantically casting about for a belief to latch on to in a process called ___.

Answer 42

Seizing; these people arrive to belief crystallization through seizing

Question 43

Once belief crystallization has occurred, a high need for closure induces a tendency to lock into that belief and adopt a more closed-minded approach to any additional information; this process is known as ___.

Answer 43

Freezing; even if that new information might modify the existing belief

Question 44

What are the 2 factors which can cause us to avoid making a decision? How do they delay decision making?

Answer 44

1) Fear of invalidity: The fear of being publically proven wrong
–> Challenges our need for competency
–> Might delay in order to seek out more information to ensure they make the right choice
2) Accountability: The implicit or explicit expectation that one may be called on to justify one’s beliefs, feelings, and actions to others’
–> when people know that they need to defend their answer, they’ll take longer to make their decision to be thorough and well-informed

Question 45

Arie Kruglanski’s theory notes that people are not only driven by ___ motivation, they are also guided by ___-___ motivation.

Answer 45

Directional (specific target in mind); non-directional (to do more or less thinking in general, as little mental effort as possible).

Question 46

True or false: In order to strive in life, you have to pick and choose where you’re gonna put in more or less effort (directional vs. non-directional) to be able to maintain competency

Answer 46

True

Question 47

What is the difference between specific closure vs. non-specific closure?

Answer 47

Specific: Implies the desirability of a particular answer to a question
–> p.ex: knowing that your child did well in the SAT)
Non-specific: Implies the desirability of any answer as long as it is definite

Question 48

Motivation toward closure varies along a continuum; individuals with a strong need for closure may display…

Answer 48

• Considerable cognitive impatience or impulsivity
• They may ‘leap’ to judgment on the basis of inconclusive evidence and exhibit rigidity of thought and reluctance to entertain views different from their own

Question 49

Motivation toward closure varies along a continuum; individuals with a need to avoid closure may display…

Answer 49

• People may savour uncertainty and be reluctant to commit to a definite opinion
  -In those circumstances, individuals may suspend judgment and be quick to engender alternatives to any emergent

Question 50

What factors can influence where you fall on the closure continuum?

Answer 50

• Heightened under time pressure
  –> p.ex: timed test, if you’re not sure of an answer, you just pick an answer quickly to be able to finish the exam on time
• Heightened when it is valued by others
  –> p.ex: when doing group work, some people may be making quick decisions so you don’t wanna slow down the process
• Heightened under conditions that render processing difficult, laborious, or aversive
  –> Noisy
  –> Tired (cognitive resources are depleted)
  –> Material is uninteresting

Question 51

Lindsey is an incredible athlete. When interviewed for the school paper about her secret to success, Lindsey said, “I’m not afraid to try something new. If it doesn’t work, I look at it as a way to learn. Challenging myself means making a lot of mistakes, but those mistakes allow me to grow and become an even better player.” With these comments, Lindsey would be identified as a(n) ________ theorist.

Answer 51

Incremental (growth mindset)

Question 52

When people adopt a(n) ____ ____, they view the task as an opportunity to learn and improve their competence.

Answer 52

Learning goal

Question 53

“The Little Engine That Could” is a children’s story of a small engine with a large sense of ________. This story demonstrates how important it is to believe that we are competent enough to achieve our goals.

Answer 53

Self-efficacy

Question 54

What does the “urgency tendency” involve in relation to the need for closure?

Answer 54

The inclination to seek closure as quickly as possible