Chapter 13 The Self-Regulation Perspective Flashcards
The Self-Regulation Perspective (Overview)
- Assumes people differ in terms of how they adopt, prioritize and maintain goals
- Personality
- Naturally occurring organized systems and how they function
- Robotics
- Viewpoint on aspects of motivation
- Focuses on how people adopt, prioritize, and attain goals
- Focus is on how the cognitions and memories result in behavior
Intentions (Icek Ajzen and Martin Fishbein)
- The process uses a kind of mental algebra to create an action probability
- If the probability is high enough, an intention forms to do the act
- When people decide whether to do something, they weigh several kinds of information
- Think about the action’s likely outcome
- How much they want it
- Attitude and subjective norm conflict
- Intention depends on which matters more: satisfying yourself or satisfying the others
Attitude (Personal)
- Belief that the behavior leads to outcomes & Desire for outcomes
- the outcome and its desirability merge to form an attitude about the behavior
- Because it stems from your own wants, your attitude is your personal orientation to the act.
Subjective Norm (Social)
- Belief that others want you to do the action & Desire to do what others want
- what other people want you to do and how much that matters merge to form a subjective norm about the action
Goals
- Experience is organized around goals
- Personal strivings
- Current concerns
- Personal projects
- People’s goals energize their activities, direct their movements- even provide meaning for their lives
- The path you choose to the overall goal depends on other aspects of your life.
- Different people use different strategies to pursue the same life goals
- The self is made up partly of goals and the organizations among them
- Traits their meaning from the goals to which they relate
- Goals and aspirations vary from person to person.
- Goals have a coherent relationship among persons from diverse cultures
- Goals form a two-dimension space -> some are compatible and some conflict
- As a person’s values shift in importance over time, an increase in the importance of one value is accompanied by slight increases in the importance of other compatible values
Goal setting
- Setting specific high goals leads to higher performance.
- When specific high goals are compared to specific easy goals
- When specific high goals are compared to the goal of “Do your best.”
- “Try to do reasonably well.” -> poorer performance than setting a specific high goal
- Higher goals lead to better performance
- Setting a higher goal causes you to try harder
- You’re more persistent
- High goals make you concentrate more, making you less susceptible to distractions
- Take up a goal that’s high enough to sustain strong effort but not so high that it’s rejected instead of adopted.
Goal Setting (Locke & Latham)
- Easy and “Do your best”: just do the standard (-)
- Hard and Specific Goal: Impossible to do (-)
- Hard and “Do your best”: At least try (+)
- Easy and Specific goal: more likely to achieve goal (+)
Goal intention
*Intent to reach a particular outcome
Implementation intention (Peter Gollwitzer)
- Concerns the how, when, and where of the process; the intention to take specific actions when encountering specific circumstances; more concrete than goal intentions
- Serve the goal intentions
- They preempt problems that arise in getting the behavior done
- Help people get started in doing the behavior
- Help prevent goal striving from straying off course
- Take specific actions when encountering specific circumstances -> If…then
- Some are habitual and well learned
- Others need to be formed consciously for specific intended paths of behavior
- concrete and specific
- helps to recognize the opportunity and act on it
- Overcome tiredness
- Doing something hard
- Create link between situational cue and strategy for moving toward the goal -> derives from the concept of possible self (images of the person you think you might become -> reference points for self-regulation)
Deliberative mindset
- Forming a goal intention requires weighing possibilities, thinking of pros and cons, and juggling options
- Deliberating the decision to act
- Open minded, careful and cautious mindset, in the service of making the best choice
- Frontal cortex
Implemental mindset (Gollwitzer, Heckhausen and Sellar)
- focuses on implementing the intention to act
- Optimistic
- Minimizes potential problems, in the service of trying as hard as possible to carry out the action
- Fosters persistence
Negative feedback loop (Carver and Scheier)
- Value for self-regulation: a goal, standard of comparison, or reference value for behavior (all of these mean the same thing here)
- Can come from many places and can exist at many levels of abstraction
- Feedback -> adjust the action, the result is feedback of a new perception -> rechecked against the reference value = control system = each event in the loop depends on the result of previous one
- Negative loop= its component processes negate, or eliminate, discrepancies between the behavior and the goal
- Aim is to decrease distance between reference value
Reference value
*Goal or else outcome you’re trying to avoid
Input
*Perception of present behavior
Discrepancy
*Comparator; measure of distance between input and goal
Meta-monitoring
- Rate of movement away or toward goal, or outcome you are trying to avoid
- Negative Feedback Loop-> Reflects how fast your discrepancy is being reduced at each subsequent time interval, and determines how happy or disappointed you feel
Positive Feedback Loop (Carver and Scheier)
*Aim is to increase distance from reference value
Self-Directed Attention and Feedback Loop
- If self-directed attention engages a comparator, behavior should be regulated more closely to the goal
- Self-focus leads to goal matching
Mental Contrasting and Goal Matching
- Mental contrasting of present states with desired end states
- Using the mental contrast as engaging the comparator function
- Mental contrasting energizes their behavior
- People are more successful in attaining their goals
Feedback Hierarchy
- There are both high-level and low-level goals that relate to each other
- Output of a high-level loop consists of setting a goal for a lower-level loop
- High-level loops don’t “behave” by creating physical actions but by providing guides to the loops below them
- Only the very lowest loops actually create physical acts, by controlling muscle groups
- Each layer receives feedback appropriate to its level of abstraction
- System concepts -> Principle control -> Programs
System Concepts
- at the top are very abstract qualities
- You don’t just go out and be your ideal self
- Trying to attain that ideal self -> trying to live in accord with the principles it incorporates
- Ex: Ideal Self Image “Be a good person”
Principles
- broad guidelines
- Specify broad qualities; be displayed in many ways
- Help you decide what activities to start and what choices to make as you do them
- Correspond to traits, or values- express values in actions
- Its abstractness and broad applicability, not its social appropriateness
- Principles act by specifying programs or by specifying decisions within programs
- Ex: “Be a clean roommate”
Programs
- Program resembles script which specifies a general course of action but with many details left out
- Make choices within a larger set of possibilities
- Programs are strategies
- Entering either programs -> conform to the same principle
- Didn’t require entering a program -> principle might have come into play during a program
- All programs have general courses of predictable acts and subgoals
- But exactly what you do at a given point can vary -> depend on situation
- Connections between programs and lower levels of control -> stronger
- Ex: “Clean up the apartment”
- When lower levels are functionally superordinate-> the higher layers have been disconnected - isn’t permanent
- Goals at higher levels can be affected by things that happen while lower levels are in charge- good or bad effect
- A program can help you match a principle
- A program can create a problem if it violates the principle
Action Identification Theory (Robin Vallacher and Dan Wegner)
- asking how people view their actions
- Any action can be identified in many ways
- Some identities are concrete, others are more abstract
- How you think about your actions presumably says something about the goals you’re using in acting
- People generally tend to see their actions in as high level a way as they can
- If people start to struggle in regulating an act at that high level -> retreat to lower-level identity for the action
- Difficulty at a high level -> lower level to become functionally superordinate
- Using the lower-level identity -> iron out the problem
- Person tends to drift again to a higher-level identification
- Experience leads to higher level identities
- People also differ in their chronic level of action identification.
Individual differences in Action Identification (Trope & Liberman 2003)
- High-level agents (meaning, goals, why you are doing) tend to be more planful and more likely to incorporate their actions into their own self concept compared to low level agents
- Low level agents (focusing on action itself) tend to be more absent minded; forget what you are doing; less likely to carry around the goal; easy to get distracted
- Low level agents have a higher likelihood of being criminals
Construal Level Theory (Yaacov Trope and Nira Liberman, 2003, 2010)
- How people construe their activities depends partly on how distant those activities are from the present moment.
- The farther in the future the activities are, the more abstractly they are viewed.
- Closer -> more concrete and less abstract
- Time-based construals - psychological distance
- The greater the psychological distance, the more abstract the mental representation becomes
- Closer -> more concrete and detailed the mental representation becomes
- Psychological distance: time, space, social distance, likelihood of occurrence, and even third person versus first-person viewpoints
- Different kinds of distance are interchangeable to some degree
- How people construe their behavior (abstractly or concretely) -> the level at which they try to regulate it.
Emotions
- Herb Simon (1967):The order in which you do things is partly a matter of priorities- how important each goal is to you at the time
- Priority are subject to rearrangement.
- Simon (1967): emotions are an internal call to rearrange
- Anxiety: not paying enough attention to personal well-being and you need to do so
- Anger: your autonomy (another goal that people value) needs to have a higher priority
- If the problem gets big enough -> emotion becomes intense enough to interrupt what you’re doing
- Emotions are produced by a system that monitors “how well things are going” toward attaining goals
- Badly and negative feelings -> engage more effort -> try harder
- Positive feelings -> “coast” a little on it and check to see if anything else needs your attention
- Coasting helps in the progress of juggling many goals at once
Effects of Expectancies
- Expectancy of success
- Having confidence in overcoming obstacles leads people back to self-regulatory effort.
- Levels of effort fall along a continuum.
- Variations in effort as forming a rough dichotomy
- Whether you keep trying or quit
- Different people emphasize different facets of expectancies.
- Bandura
- Efficacy expectancy: the belief that one has the personal capability of doing the action that needs to be done.
- Expectancies -> how hard people try and how well they do
- Confident individuals do better in many ways -> persistent and perform better
- Having confidence in diverse areas helped the women cope more effectively with their social world.
Disengage
- When people feel doubt, however, they are more likely to disengage: reduce their effort toward goal attainment
- They may even abandon the goal altogether- temporarily or permanently
Confidence About Life: Effects of Generalized Optimism
- Optimism is generalized confidence
- Pessimism is generalized doubt-not about a specific outcome but about life in general
- This generalized confidence -> traitlike
- Stable over time
- Genetically influenced
- People who are optimistic about life are liked better than pessimists
- Better at forming social networks when they go to a new environment
- Better in relationships because more supportive of their partners in resolving conflicts
- Deal better with adversity than pessimists
- Have less distress, are more focused on moving forward, and are less likely to withdraw from their usual activities
- Seem more prepared to accept the situation as real
- Don’t stick their heads in the sand and ignore threats to their well-being
- Less likely to require rehospitalization after having major heart surgery
- Literally healed better
- Lower risk of cancer death, cardiovascular death, and mortality in general
- Pervasive health benefits
Partial Disengagement
*Between effort and giving up
-Sometimes a goal can’t be attained, but another one can be substituted for it
-Sometimes disengagement involves only scaling back from a lofty goal in a given domain to a less demanding one- giving up the first goal, more limited, doesn’t mean leaving the domain entirely
=Partial disengagement -> engaged in the domain you had wanted to quit
=Scaling back- giving up in a small way- trying to move ahead but not giving up in a larger way
-Whether giving up is bad or good depends on the context
=It’s a poor way of coping with the ordinary difficulties of life
=Sometimes being persistent would pay off in success.
=It’s necessary to give up or defer goals when circumstances make it hard or impossible to reach them.
==The failure to disengage -> continuing distress
Kurt Lewin “Level of aspiration”
- Success causes us to raise our level of aspiration. This is related to Bandura’s idea of self efficacy (i.e. Efficacy expectancy)
- Failure causes us to lower our level of aspiration.
- Occasionally, people “leave the field”
- This happens for different reasons following success vs. failure
- “Leaving the field” following failure is also known as disengagement
Assessment of Self-Regulatory Qualities
*It may be useful to measure individual differences in those self-regulatory processes
-Private self-consciousness: tendency to be self-reflective- to think about your feelings, motives, actions, and so on
=High in self-consciousness-> careful and thorough self-regulators (maybe even obsessive-compulsive ones)
==If their actions don’t match their intentions -> adjust accordingly
=Lower in self-consciousness -> more random and less guided in behavior
=Self-consciousness relates to conscientiousness from the five-factor model
==People high in self-consciousness are more prone to engage in self-regulation that’s automatic and nonconscious
Tapnell and Campbell (1999)-Rumination-Reflection Questionnaire
- Two motives underlie it: curiosity (a growth-oriented motive) and the desire to probe negative feelings states (which is ultimately a safety-seeking motive, if the source of the feelings can be isolated)
- Rumination: being unable to put something behind you -> relates to neuroticism
- Reflection: being fascinated and inquisitive -> relates to openness to experience
Vallacher and Wegner (1989): Behavior Identification Form
- Whether people tend to view their behavior in high-level or lower-level terms
- People with similar traits can differ greatly if they think of their goals at different levels
- Identify actions at high levels -> look at the “big picture” whether they’re socializing studying, or making music
- Identify actions at lower levels -> focus more on the “nuts and bolts” of what’s going on
Problems in Behavior, and Behavior Change
*Hierarchical model
-Conflict occurs when a person is committed to two goals that can’t be attained easily at the same time.
-Alternate between the goals -> can be exhausting and distressing
-Decide that one goal contributes more to your higher-order values
-People sometimes want to abstract goals but lack the know-how to reach them
*Problems from an inability to disengage
-Because they are high in your hierarchy (central to your self) or represent paths to those higher goals
-Giving up on the person you want to be
-Deep doubt -> repeated cycle of sporadic effort, doubt, distress, disengagement, and confronting the goal again
-Keep thinking about a failure -> motivate you to try harder next time
=How to do things differently next time
=Dangerous to dwell on a failure when it can’t be undone -> major distress results
-Susan Nolen-Hoeksema: people who are prone to depression focus much of their attention on their sad feelings
=Rumination acts -> prolong depressed state
Self-Regulation and Therapy
- Therapy-> break down the automaticity
- Provide them with a way to make the desired responses automatic in place of the problem responses
- Kanfer and Busemeyer (1982): process of therapy is itself a dynamic feedback system
- Series of stages in which clients repeatedly use feedback- both from therapy sessions and from actions outside therapy- to guide their movements through a long-term plan of change
- The goals and issues also keep changing
- Keep checking to make sure the concrete goals you’re working toward support your higher-order goals
Means-end analysis
- a useful way to create choices
- Start by noting the difference between your present state and your desired state (end)
- Think of an action that would reduce the difference (mean)
- Abstract -> break into subgoals and steps -> concrete and complete -> create a strategy
The Self-Regulation Perspective: Problems and Prospects
- Loose ends and unanswered questions with the cognitive view
- Derives from the robics metaphor it sometimes employs
- A model based on feedback principles is merely a model of homeostasis
- Hierarchical model fails to deal effectively with the homunculus problem
- Homunculus: how people act
- Where do the highest goals come from- the ones that specify all the lower goals?
- All this seems too much a description from the outside looking in
- Too little feel of what it means to have a personality
- Emphasizes structure and process, rather than content -> aren’t well specified
- Focus on issues that stand at a slight tangent from personality -> not focus directly on personality
