Personal Control Beliefs and The Self

This week we discussed how the self and how personal control beliefs influence motivation. Firstly expectancy of our own capabilities and abilities to perform a task and our expectancy that performing this task will lead to a positive result, both influence one’s motivation. As such one can believe they have the skills to complete a task but if completing the task doesn’t lead to desired outcomes then they will lose motivation to perform.

Self efficacy refers to the cognitively held belief that one can cope with a situation given their set of skills. One can acquire a high self efficacy from referring to their history of performance with repeated success in a domain influencing high self efficacy as well as being influenced by other people’s success in the domain and through acts of encouragement from others.  Those with high self efficacy are then more motivated in that domain and thus are more likely to persevere when the task becomes difficult. High self efficacy also positively influences creativity as well as increasing positive emotions.

Related to self efficacy is mastery beliefs; the perceived control one has over attaining desirable outcomes and presenting aversive ones. If one perceives that their actions will influence outcomes they will be more motivated to act and will be more likely to see negative feedback or failures as information which they can use to improve their performance rather than internalise the failure and becoming helpless.

Learned helplessness refers to the idea that if one persistently experiences situations where their behaviour does not effect outcomes they begin to believe they have no control over what happens to them, thus they learn to be helpless. This causes one to have very low motivation to act and can lead to depression. It is interesting to consider that this is an adaptive response that stops one from wasting energy on tasks or situations that are indeed out of their control however they perceived lack of control is then generalised to all aspects of one’s life.

Learned Helplessness was originally studied using chambers like this one

I found it very interesting that learned helplessness research lead to the finding that those with depression are more likely to realistically assess when they actually do have no control. Thus, it appears to be good for one’s wellbeing to perceive one has control in situations where they do not, or perceive they are more capable at coping that they actually are.  

Perceptions of one’s self also influence motivation. I found Reeve’s (2009) discussion on self esteem very interesting as it does seem intuitive that raising self esteem would positively influence motivation and achievement however the research suggest this is not the case. Rather that increases in achievement increase self esteem not the other way round. This doesn’t detract from the positive influence self esteem can have on wellbeing but questions the assumption that self esteem motivates one to perform well.

The different aspects of the self can greatly influence one motivation. We are motivated to act in ways that are consistent with ones cognitive schema of one’s self and motivated to consistently improve ourselves by differences between out ideal self and our actual self. This motivates us to approach tasks that we believe will confirm our self schema’s but also to avoid tasks that might disconfirm them. Thus this relates to self efficacy as described earlier because if we have a strong belief in our abilities we are more likely to try and achieve things consistent with our self schema than to be motivated to avoid failing at such tasks.

Reeve, J. (2009). Understanding motivation and emotion (5th ed.). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.