Second Chapter; Incubation Stage
Third Chapter, After Incubation Stage; Staying Motivated
Our motivation model consists of:
This system is an exercise or practice that will take the reader on the path below:
(Apathy, negativity, and boredom)-----> Intrinsic Motivation-----> Creativity
The most important element of this article is about observation, seeing, and making sense of the information we receive with mindfulness. Knowing what mindfulness is to discover our intrinsic motivations, awareness, and innermost qualities of our being, way deeper than thoughts, that allows us to face the joy of the moments and/or face the turmoil of the life.
Trying to see and observe the world in many different ways and different perspectives with mindfulness is the essence of creativity and motivation. If you achieve the awareness of how different things look depending on your perspective, you can then open many more choices for yourself.
Such awareness is liberating. Mindful creativity can turn lives troubled by boredom and loneliness into lives that are rich and exciting.
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The above illustration is the base theory and the model behind this article. Human consciousness is more like an information processing system, yet a productive factory. You must remember two aspects of this factory. One is the input (observation and attention) and next is the machinery (consciousness).
Explaining the Left Side of the Illustration; the Vicious Circle
If as the result of your life observations, your consciousness inputs/outputs voice of blame and negative voice of judgment to your consciousness, you will feel apathy, boredom, and helplessness, which will lead to depression. You must realize that all these happen because of your skewed observations, perceptions, and your past programming (machinery).
Notice in the illustration above, we discuss pain and numbness as the result of negativity and self-deceptions. Daniel Goleman in his excellent book Vital Lies, Simple Truths discusses an interesting observation. To paraphrase Dr. Goleman, "Take, for example, the simple act of looking. Do we really see what we look at? The best evidence is that we don't; instead, we see what we look for."
According to Dr. Goleman, the process of self-deception is a protective mechanism for survival of mind or brain. Professor Goleman actually shows that brain produces a neurochemical that has a numbing effect on brain (to reduce the pain) that effects dimming of awareness and reduction in attention. This seems like a vicious circle; skewed attention or skewed perception brings pain, which induces a chemical that has numbing effect which dimes the awareness or reduces the attention. All these have terrible amotivation and helplessness consequences.
When an environment allows neither self-determination nor competence, people will become amotivated accompanied by helplessness, depression, and self-disparagement. A situation will be amotivating when one perceives oneself to be incompetent to attain one's desired outcomes. This would typically occur when one receives persistently negative feedback about one's performance and/or when one repeatedly fails.
Professor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has similar views. He believes the consciousness experiences unpleasant disorders and random drift when not engaged in goal directed actions. He defines anxiety and boredom as a painful sensation experienced by a drifting consciousness that lack motivation and concentration. His simple solution is to train the body through jogging, yoga, martial arts; developing hobbies like woodworking, painting, or playing a musical instrument. The way all these activities work is through a rigorous demand for focus attention, heightened concentration, and preventing disorder in the consciousness.
Professor Csikszentmihalyi believes majority of the thoughts that come to our minds when not concentrating on an activity or working are depressing. There are more bad things in our lives than good ones. Professor Csikszentmihalyi also believes, as part of evolution and adaptation, by dwelling on unpleasant possibilities, we might be better prepared for the unexpected. When the mind dwells on something negative, it creates conflict in consciousness. Depression, anger, fear, and jealousy are simple manifestations of such conflicts. While negative feelings last, they take over our minds and sap the motivation.
Professor Csikszentmihalyi’s observation about evolution and adaptation is very important since it can also have positive notions. If these conflicts are created in the right way, when the mind dwells on positive conflicts, they will translate into creativity. Intrinsically motivated behaviors are also aimed at establishing certain internal conditions that are rewarding. These conditions are related with the needs of the brain and may be sought in order to avoid or reduce threats to the functioning of the brain. These threats to functioning may be of creative nature and needs. Indeed, when people are free from the intrusion of drives and emotions, they seek situations that interest them and require the use of their creativity and resourcefulness. They seek challenges that are suited to their competencies that are neither too easy nor too difficult. When they find optimal challenges, people work to conquer them, and they do so persistently. In short, the needs for competence and self-determination keep people involved in ongoing cycles of seeking and conquering optimal challenges.
When people are intrinsically motivated, they tend to perceive the locus of causality for their behavior to be internal, and they are guided more by their internal states. When people are extrinsically motivated, they, however, tend to perceive the locus of causality to be external, and their behavior is more a function of external controls. Hence, people develop more self-esteem; they are more creative and competent when intrinsically motivated.
Still explaining the left side of our model or illustrations, Professor Ellen Langer explains how holding fixed views can make us blind to things right in front of us, and how we pay a high price for this. According to Dr. Langer, mindlessness sets in when we rely too rigidly on certain categories and distinctions created in our mind from past experiences. The categories we make in our lives, slowly gather momentum and are very hard to overthrow. From these categories, we build our own realities and then we become victims of them. For example, we believe everything we read in newspapers, even the advertisings, are written with good intentions, are true, and can never be wrong. We tend to take every thing we hear or read as the gospel of truth. Another factor according to Dr. Langer is Automatic or Autopilot Behavior. Psychologists believe the a vast number of actions that we think of as intelligent, such as reading and writing, can be done automatically and to act without any conscious volition.
Dr. Langer describes a very interesting example summing both of these factors: someone placed an ad in a Los Angeles Newspaper that read, "it's not too late to send $1 to --------------," and gave the person's name and address. The reader was promised nothing and absolutely nothing in return. Many people replied, enclosing a dollar and sent it to the address provided.
Perhaps living a life on autopilot might bring destructive consequences. In the same manner, to paraphrase John Holt: people who watch television on autopilot learn that characters they watch on TV are in every way better than they are. They see younger, sexier, smarter, stronger, faster, braver, richer, happier, more successful and respected TV personalities. Then when the (autopilot) time comes to get up and turn off the set, the thoughts are even more destructive in their minds, "Why couldn't I have been more like them?"
Some researchers have gone even farther and claim that apathy, lack of optimism, hopelessness, and depressions have become synonymous with new life adjustments. To paraphrase Anne Wilson Schaef in When Society Becomes and Addict , “rather than looking for ways to change, to save ourselves, we are becoming more conservative, more complacent, and more defensive of the status quo. Those few individuals who notice and draw attention to these growing problems are met with massive denial (emphasis on DENIAL ). When they run for public office, they are not elected. When they confront us with what they know, they are ignored, dismissed, or discredited.” I just like to add one thought to what she claims on ignoring those who try to wake us up. How many have heard of Donald Trump and how many know the name Langer or Csikszentmihalyi?
How to melt the left side of the illustration and move to the right side; breaking The Vicious Circle
If you change your observation and also set up the new machinery of autonomy, integration, relatedness, and creativity you will get self determination, healthy curiosity, competency, skills, self–esteem, choice, enjoyment of tasks, more defined goals, improved information gathering, doing it because it is interesting, and achievement orientation as output.
The trick is to change the way you observe the world around you. A very effective way to reprogram your mind is to develop child-like, and/or naive state of mind. Eastern Mindfulness, spiritual paths such jhana, some Hindu meditation skills such as Vipassana, and Yoga also help with this procedure. When you master spiritual meditation, at some point in your sittings, there comes a point when insights about yourself, your mind and how it works (basically the left side of your consciousness) will flash into your mind and that is when you can dismantle it effectively. By spiritual meditation, we achieve stability and focus in our mind. It is liberating and enlightening, because it lets go of pain or the left side of illustration.
As we mentioned, human consciousness is more like a productive factory. The two important aspects of this factory are the input (observation and attention) and the machinery (consciousness). The way to change the machinery is to start understanding how you can be more:
1) Mindful,
2) Receptive to new information, perhaps with child-like observations,
3) Aware of other perspective,
4) Autonomous
5) Relate more to people you trust and respect.
The change in machinery concerns more the need for autonomy and developing meaningful relationships with friends, colleagues, neighbors and society itself.
The main and first ingredient of intrinsic motivation is autonomy. Autonomy is when one acts in accord with one's self; it means self-governing and feeling free to take responsibilities for one's actions. Autonomous people go about their activities with a sense of interest and commitment.
According to the research, there are eight fundamentals of value happiness; psychologists define the fundamentals of happiness as:
1. Connection to others,
2. Autonomy,
3. Self-esteem,
4. Competence,
5. Purpose,
6. Connection to your body,
7. Connection to nature,
8. Spirituality.
Creativity needs imagination, curiosity, fantasies, and foresights. These would not be possible if the consciousness is not operating on the right side (of our illustration or model) where it is free, fluent, flexible, original and autonomous. When your consciousness has completed its transfer from the left side of illustration to the right side, you are now ready to tinker with your creative side.
A curious mind that is in such a heightened condition needs challenge (needs conflict according to Dr. Csikszentmihalyi), a good and virtuous challenge, and perhaps a need to be satisfied. A perfect conditioned consciousness creates these virtuous challenges by purified conflicts (intrinsically) to perhaps make our life better (inventions) or just to create for the aesthetic pleasure (arts) or love of the passion (dance, photography, woodcarving, rock climbing,....). Once these challenges are created, we attack them with no mercy. The output or the results of these small conflicts are usually hard work, timelessness, and foresights. Perhaps a good question is how one stimulates more of these conflicts inside the consciousness. A child-like observation and a heightened attention are the essential factors.
As you discover your creative side, you will become more innovative and might use these innovations for yourself or let others benefit too. When you modify a tool, add an extra ingredient to your cooking, or find a new way to perform an ordinary task more effectively, with heightened concentration and curiosity, you innovate. That's how, if you remember the one-time famous accounting program Lotus 123 now widely replaced by Excel (Microsoft), was developed. An extremely bright accountant in Jet Propulsion Laboratory developed Lotus 123 and was using it in his own office (just for himself) three years before someone suggested that he should sell his software on the market. Notice the level of intrinsic motivations in this young man, just for the love of doing it and benefiting from it.
The science behind meditation; Mechanisms of Self-Motivation
Paul J. Silvia University of North Carolina at Greensboro
Thomas Shelley Duval University of Southern California
Self-Focused Attention and Self-Evaluation. Objective self-awareness (OSA) theory argues that self-motivation is founded on a small set of interacting elements. We assume that people have a concept of self, derived from encountering different social perspectives (Shibutani, 1961). The features of the self-concept can be compared to internalized standards of correctness that specify features the self ought to have. Standards can be unattainable, vague, abstract, perfectionistic, idiosyncratic, and inconsistent with other standards. Other theories have suggested different kinds of standards-such as ideals versus oughts (Higgins, 1987) or approach versus avoidance goals (Carver & Scheier, 1998)-but all standards share the functional quality of specifying a feature that the self should have.
People don't constantly monitor how self fares relative to its standards. Most self-theories go awry by assuming that simply failing to meet a standard will reduce self-esteem. Almost everything people do violates at least one standard, given the number, complexity, perfectionism, and abstraction of standards. People have so many features of self, and so many standards relevant to the features, that there must be a mechanism that connects a specific aspect of the self to a specific standard. OSA theory diverges from nearly every other self-theory by specifying when standards affect self-evaluation. People only compare self with standards to the extent that attention is self-focused. Unlike most animals, people can consider self as an object with features. This state of "objective self-awareness" promotes comparison of self with standards. If people aren't self-focused, then self-standard discrepancies won't impact activity. Self-awareness theory, in this sense, is primary over other theories of self-evaluation because so few theories consider when people self-evaluate in the first place.
Situational factors influence the momentary level of self-awareness (Duval & Silvia, 2001, chap. 2). Attention orients on self whenever the self stands out from the background formed by the social context or past experience. Being distinctive in some way-the one actor among a crowd of observers, the one woman in a group of men-will draw attention to self because of figure-ground principles of attention. Stimuli reminding the person of the self's object status-hearing recordings of one's voice or seeing one's image on TV-should also increase self-awareness, particularly if they involve experiencing the self in unusual ways. Finally, targeting the attention system directly, such as by priming self-relevant knowledge or consuming alcohol, will affect self-awareness. Much has been made of individual differences in self-focused attention, known as private selfconsciousness (Buss, 1980). We suspect that "trait self-awareness" reflects enduring situational consistencies or enduring beliefs that self deviates from a reference group.
In short, self-evaluation requires self-focused attention. Many studies show that standards are inert when self-focus is low, even when people are preselected for extreme standards (e.g., Gibbons, 1978; Silvia, 2002) and when standards are explicitly induced and manipulated (e.g., Duval & Lalwani, 1999). People will only appraise how self relates to standards to the extent that attention is self-focused. Situational features influence the momentary levels of self-focused attention, and thus the degree of self-evaluation. But what happens once people begin self-evaluating?
Causal Attributions for the Experience of Discrepancies. When people are self-focused and thus comparing self with standards, they typically notice disparities between how the self is and how the self should be. OSA theory is rooted in consistency theories of motivated cognition (Heider, 1960; Wicklunc 1 & Brehm, 1976). We assume that people prefer congruity between different aspects of self, congruity between different standards, and congruity between self and standards. Self-standard discrepancies thus generate negative affect because the ideal state is maximal similarity between self and standards. The catch, however, is that people don't necessarily know why they feel bad. We assume that the experience of affect does not contain information about its cause. If it did, "misattribution" would be impossible-people would inherently know why they feel bad. If emotions don't immediately tell us why we feel the emotion, then we need another process to interpret the affective experience and connect it to a cause. This is the process of causal attribution. When events occur that are surprising, unexpected, inconsistent, complex, or imbalanced, people make attributions for why the event occurred (Weiner, 1985). When people suddenly experience negative affect, attributional processes will seek to connect this event to a likely cause. The attribution process is often automatic, and thus experienced as perception rather than as inference (Heider, 1958a).
Attributions are fundamental to self-motivation for two reasons. First, attributions direct action. If people don't know why they feel bad, then they also don't necessarily know what to do about it. If negative affect doesn't contain information about its cause, then it also doesn't contain information about specific situated actions that would make people feel better. Attributions for the problem give people a foothold into possible solutions for the problem. As Heider (1958b) argued, "attribution serves the attainment of a stable and consistent environment, gives a parsimonious and at the same time often an adequate description of what happens, and determines what we expect will occur and what we should do about it" (p. 25). By telling people what caused an event, attributions give people expectations about what might change the event. Attributions thus suggest targets for action. We assume that people will act on the perceived cause of the problem, all else being equal. If people think that they feel badly because their standards are too high, then they'll change the standards; if people think that self was the cause of failure, then they'll change self (Duval & Lalwani, 1999).
Second, attributions undergird self-motivation because they influence evaluations. Based on Heider's (1958a) analysis of tendencies toward congruity between unit and sentiment relations, we have suggested that attributions lead to attitude formation (Duval & Silvia, 2001, chap. 7). When people attribute the cause of failure to self-that is, connect the self to the negative event in a cause-effect unit relationship-then people will evaluate the self negatively because connected elements become similar in valence. This is one way of thinking about "state self-esteem." If people attribute their failure to another person, then they should dislike that person as well as anything similar to the person. By connecting positive or negative events to the self, to other people, to standards, or to anything else, attributions lead people to evaluate the perceived cause positively or negatively.
Interaction of Self-Evaluation and Attribution:
Can the Person Meet a Standard?
Thus far, we've seen how self-focused attention leads people to recognize discrepancies between self and standards, and how people then make attributions for the negative affect aroused by the discrepancy. Selfstandard comparison and causal attribution are the two core processes in objective self-awareness theory. But there's a catch-the comparison process can affect the attribution process. We assume that there are motives associated with attributional processes. People want to make coherent, simple, and consistent attributions (Heider, 1958a). Linking events to their "most plausible causes" accomplishes this general goal (Duval & Duval, 1983). But sometimes attributional simplicity conflicts with self-standard consistency. Imagine a case where a person fails and self is the most plausible cause of failure. Attributing the experience of failure to self will create discrepancies but it will also connect the event tet the most likely cause. Attributing failure externally, in contrast, averts discrepancies but at the cost of making a less consistent attribution. The first attribution privileges the attribution system; the second, the comparison system. This conflict arises whenever the self is the most plausible cause for a negative event (more precisely, for any event that would create a self-standard discrepancy'upon attribution to self).
So what happens when people are the most plausible cause for a negative event? We assume that this conflict is reconciled by people's perceived rate of progress toward reducing the discrepancy. People compromise. If people believe they can rapidly reduce the problem, then they'll attribute the problem to self. This promotes a consistent attribution and creates a discrepancy-but people expect the discrepancy to be quickly reduced. If people feel unable to reduce the problem, either at all or at too slow of a rate, then they'll attribute the problem externally. Blaming something else isn't the most consistent attribution, but it does avoid an intractable self-standard discrepancy. And people then attribute failure to the next most likely cause (Silvia & Duval, 2001b), which satisfies the attributional goal to some degree. Many studies support these predictions.
When perceived rate of progress is low, people blame the environment and other people for their failure (Duval & Silvia, 2002), disengage from the task (Carver & Scheier, 1998), and avoid remedial tasks (Duval, Duval, & Mulilis, 1992). When rate of progress is high, however, people blame themselves for failure, experience reduced self-esteem (Duval & Silvia, 2002), take responsibility for the problem (Lalwani & Duval, 2000), and actively try to reduce the discrepancy (Duval et al., 1992; Duval & Lalwani, 1999).
Summary. These are the concepts and dynamics posited by objective self-awareness theory. Self-focused attention can uncover self-standard discrepancies; attributions determine how people deal with the problem and how they feel about the perceived cause; and self-evaluation can sometimes affect attributions. Self-motivation thus rests in the interplay of two systems that reflect motives for consistent cognitive organization (Heider, 1960): a system that prefers congruity between self and standards, and a system that prefers simple attributional structure. Note that we described each concept without relying on past observations. We did not infer that self-focused attention leads to self-standard comparison because we have observed it in the past. Self-awareness theory makes assumptions about constructs and how they relate-this allows the theory to make predictions about new observations.
Reinterpreting the Self-Motives
In this section, we see how objective self-awareness theory reinterprets the four self-motives. We hope to show that apparently opposing behaviors stem from the same dynamics, not from opposing motives. Not only can the theory recast each motive in terms of dynamic processes, but it can specify boundaries and make new predictions.
Self-Enhancement. Self-enhancement motivation has been inferred from behaviors like attributing failure externally, defining traits in terms of the self's qualities, viewing oneself as better than average, and making downward social comparisons. But the boundaries of self-enhancement are poorly defined in the self-motives approach. Self-awareness theory, in contrast, makes firm predictions about when people will self-enhance. First, we recast self-enhancement in terms of comparing self with standards of correctness. Statements such as "people strive for self-concept positivity" are vague unless we know what indicates a positive self. As a more specific alternative, we argue that people want to be congruent with their internalized standards, which specify the qualities of "the good self."Framing self-enhancement in terms of meeting personal standards makes new predictions. As a general rule, "self-enhancing" activity should be more likely when people are self-focused. If a person isn't comparing self with standards, then the person won't recognize or care about discrepancies-meeting standards won't be a concern. Failure feedback, for instance, has little impact on self-serving attributions and self-esteem when self-awareness is low (Duval & Silvia, 2002; Silvia & Duval, 200lb), a finding hard to reconcile with a blanket self-enhancement motive.
When people are self-focused and thus self-evaluating against their standards, then people's perceived ability to reduce the discrepancy influences "self-enhancing" activity. When self-focused people fail, they selfenhance when they feel unable to deal with the problem-they blame the environment and other people for their problem, have no change in selfesteem, avoid remedial tasks, and so forth. When self-focused people feel able to improve, however, they blame self for the problem, experience reduced self-esteem, and actively try to do something about the problem. And when people are not self-focused, very little happens. They admit that their performance was substandard, but they do not act defensively or experience changes in self-esteem (Duval & Silvia, 2002). Such findings are not easily explained within the self-motives approach, even after the fact, but they are predicted by OSA theory.
We suspect that other symptoms of self-enhancement-like self-serving trait definitions, better-than-average effects, and downward comparisonsfollow the same dynamics. Research on trait definition usually involves self-relevant traits for which people have standards, and thus potentially have discrepancies (Dunning, 1999). If a person defines a standard (e.g., a good leader) in terms of the qualities that the self already has, then the person has effectively ensured that self will be consistent with the prototype. If the trait is irrelevant to a person's standards, or if the person feels discrepant but able to improve, then we suspect that people wouldn't define traits in terms of the self. Likewise, viewing the self as better-than-average probably reflects the fact that most standards are defined in terms of relative performance. Because many traits and abilities have no objective index, people judge the self through social comparison (Festinger, 1954). Perceiving self as better-than-average thus reduces a perceived discrepancy between self and a standard defined by relative performance. If so, then the effect should vary as an interactive function of self-focus and ability to improve the problem. Likewise, downward social comparison makes self seem closer to a standard due to the contrast with the unfortunate person's position. Consisten~ with our analysis, Wills (1981) found that people make downward comparisons only when they can't improve.
In short, people show "self-enhancing" activity according to the boundaries predicted by self-awareness theory. When self-awareness is low, people don't self-enhance. When self-awareness is high, people selfenhance when they feel unable to improve, and don't self-enhance when they feel able to improve. Rather than a blanket motive bounded only with other blanket motives, self-enhancement seems to have a circumscribed pattern of dynamics.
Self-Assessment. Although the idea of a general motive "to know oneself" has an intuitive appeal, research shows that "self-assessment motivation" applies rather narrowly. Sedikides and Strube (1997) found that signs of self-assessment appear only when people are highly uncertain about an important self-aspect. This hardly indicates a broad motive, selfor otherwise. We also doubt that studies forcing people to take or create tasks can show "self-assessment motivation," even when subsequent feedback is optional. Claiming a motive to understand the self seems premature unless we know how many people don't care and would rather not take the task at all.
Either way, the basic main effect is that people prefer diagnostic tasks and performance feedback when they are uncertain about an important ability. An underappreciated point is that "diagnosticity" of a task is confounded with the participant's attributions for task performance. If a task is diagnostic, then the feedback says something about one's ability-an internal attribution is implied. If a task is not diagnostic, then the feedback implies nothing about one's ability. Diagnosticity thus implies performance attributions. In fact, participants seem to understand this. People predict that their self-esteem will go up on tasks that are diagnostic of success and go down on tasks diagnostic of failure (Trope, 1986). Attributional processes, which we view as foundational to self-motivation, are thus lurking in the background of self-assessment.
OSA theory predicts that concerns about self's properties only come about when people are self-focused, as people are in the typical psychology experiment (Duval & Silvia, 2001, chap. 2). When self-focus is lowered, "self-assessment" motivation should be minimal. When self-focus increases, however, people recognize that self could fail to meet a standard. As before, the dynamics of self-awareness predict that if people feel capable of initially succeeding or eventually improving, then they should prefer diagnostic tasks because success on such a task will reveal selfstandard congruity and thus boost self-esteem (Duval & Silvia, 2002, study 3). If people do not feel capable of initially succeeding or eventually improving, they should prefer the nondiagnostic task, avoid feedback, and generally wish to leave the field.
A study of private self-consciousness supports our analysis (Carver, Antoni, & Scheier, 1985). People were given success or failure feedback on a first test. They were then allowed to choose items for the second test.
Some items allowed feedback, and other items did not. People who succeeded on the first task probably expected to do well on the second similar task; people who failed probably expected to do poorly. When selfconsciousness was high, people who succeeded chose more items with feedback, and people who failed chose more items without feedback. When self-consciousness was low, however, people seemed unmotivated by self-assessment. Other research has found that people seek feedback when they can improve and avoid feedback when they can't improve (Dunning, 1995). People also make upward social comparisons when they feel they can improve but not when they can't improve (Ybema & Buunk, 1993).
For self-assessment, then, the core variables asserted by self-awareness theory-self-focused attention, probability of improvement, and attributions-nicely cover extant findings and suggest new predictions. When people aren't particularly self-focused, potential successes and failures are insignificant because people aren't self-evaluating (Carver et al., 1985). When people become self-focused, they become concerned with possible failure, particularly for" diagnostic tasks," which imply that self is responsible for success and failure. As with other areas, probability of improvement should moderate defensive versus constructive activity. If people feel able to succeed, or if they feel able to improve should they fail, then they should seek feedback and approach the task. If people feel unable to improve, however, they should avoid diagnostic tasks and feedback.
As before, a seemingly blanket motive shows a coherent, circumscribed pattern of dynamics. And, interestingly enough, the dynamics of selfassessment resemble the dynamics of self-enhancement described earlier. Presumably contrary self-motives (like assessment and enhancement) and presumably contrary activities (like feedback seeking and avoidance) stem from the same set of processes. We thus begin to see why selfawareness theory is a general theory of self-motivation.
Self- Verification. Self-verification is inferred from activities such as choosing to interact with someone who confirms one's self-view and liking others who are similar, even when the self-view and the dimensions of similarity are negative (Griffitt, 1966; Swann et al., 1989). We interpret these effects in terms of the consistency motivation that leads people to prefer consistent, harmonious organizations of knowledge and experience. Objective self-awareness theory belongs to social psychology's group of "consistency theories." We assume that people prefer consistency between aspects of self, between their standards, and between self and standards. The theory focuses on self-standard consistency, but it argues for a broad cognitive consistency motive (Heider, 1958a, 1960). In a consistency model, enhancement becomes striving for consistency between self and standards, and verification becomes striving for consistency between different self-aspects and between incoming and existing self-knowledge. We thus view conflicts between enhancement and verifIcation as chimerical. If both activities stem from cognitive consistency motivation, then any "motive conflict" is merely apparent.
OSA theory makes predictions concerning when people will "selfverify" versus "self-enhance." When people are self-focused and perceive a discrepancy, they are motivated to deal with the discrepancy. But if selffocused people do not perceive a discrepancy, then self-standard congruity isn't a concern. Other kinds of congruity can then become significant. So, if an experimenter shows the participant evaluations by two different people-one self-consistent and one self-inconsistent-then this creates inconsistency between existing and incoming self-information. People will try to resolve this incongruity by choosing exposure to the consistent information. So, increased self-focused attention should amplify "selfverification," interpreted here as consistency restoration, when people don't perceive a self-standard discrepancy. When self-focused people perceive a discrepancy, then the dynamics described earlier (appraising one's ability to improve, making attributions for performance) will occur.
It is surprising that self-awareness dynamics have never been intersected with self-verification. Some indirect support for our view comes from experiments on introspection and self-verification. People were asked to evaluate and select evaluations that matched or contradicted their self-concepts; no self-standard discrepancies were induced. When people could introspect about their choices-a process involving selfawareness-the preference for self-consistent evaluations was enhanced (Hixon & Swann, 1993).
Self-Improvement. Self-improvement motivation assimilates easily into the dynamics of OSA theory. The SCENT model's view of selfimprovement fails to say when people don't care about self-improvement, and it fails to specify which self-aspects the person wants to improve. Human incompetence is vast. Most people freely admit they are bad at bowling, bad at mental math, bad at running, bad at avoiding unhealthy foods, and so on. If people know they're bad at so many things, why don't they want to self-improve all of these things? Why don't people drop everything to improve at topiary gardening? Perhaps "it isn't important"; but why isn't it important? The notion of a general motive to self-improve is too vague to be useful-people don't want limitless expertise at everything. A model of self-improvement must specify when people care about improvement, and what specific things they want to improve.
OSA theory argues that recognizing a discrepancy between self and a standard is a necessary condition for self-improvement. "Improvement" is impossible unless people (1) think improvement is needed (i.e., see a discrepancy), and (2) have some representation of what an improved self would look like (i.e., a standard). So, people don't self-improve their topiary gardening skills because they have no standards related to it. Discrepancies are impossible without standards, so motivation to reduce discrepancies is absent. Only when people have a standard for a self-aspect and feel they fall short of the standard does "self-improvement motivation" become an issue.
But OSA theory is even more specific than this. When people feel discrepant and think they can reduce the discrepancy, then they will attempt self-improvement. When people feel unable to improve their situation, they'll avoid the situation. A lot of research supports this prediction. Selffocused people who felt able to improve their deficient performance spent more time on remedial tasks and signed up for a second remedial session more quickly. When people felt unable to improve, they spent less time on the remedial tasks and procrastinated signing up for them when forced to do so (Dana, Lalwani, & Duval, 1997; Duval et a1., 1992; Mulilis & Duval, 1995).
The effect of expected improvement on activity is moderated by self attribution for the discrepancy. Earlier we argued that attributions undergird self-motivation because people try to change the perceived cause of their problem. When people see the self as responsible for failing and feel they can improve, they try to change the self to match the standard. When people feel their poor performance was caused by something else, they try to change that other thing. For instance, people who attributed failure to self worked significantly harder on a second practice trial. Self-attributions significantly mediated the effects of the manipulations on subsequent "selfimproving" activity. But when people attributed failure to the standard, they changed the standard. They didn't try to change self, even though they felt able to do so (Dana et a1., 1997; Duval & Lalwani, 1999). Research in other areas also finds that self-attributions mediate effects of feedback on interest in remedial tasks (Hong, Chiu, Dweck, Lin, & Wan, 1999).
Self-improvement effects, then, are easily predicted by self-awareness dynamics. Self-improvement only becomes an issue when people feel discrepant from a standard. This is why people don't try to improve all selfaspects simultaneously. Unlike the SCENT model, OSA theory can predict specifically when people care about improvement, what specific things they'll try to improve, as well as when people avoid improvement opportunities. And as before, the dynamics of self-improvement are identical to the dynamics of the other self-motives. The same processes-selffocused attention, perceived ability to improve, and attributions-predict the seemingly different effects. Once again, we see how OSA theory can be a general view of self-motivation.
Summary. Objective self-awareness theory offers a general system of self-motivation-it collapses qualitative distinctions between self-motives and supplants them with a dynamic analysis of underlying processe.:: and their interactions. Do people perceive a discrepancy between self and their standards? If so, do they feel they can do anything about it? Is the experience of the discrepancy attributed to self or to something else? With just a few concepts and some assumptions about their relations, objective self-awareness theory shows how the dynamics of the four self-motives are basically identical. If apparently antagonistic behaviors-seeking and avoiding diagnostic tasks, or blaming self versus another person for one's failure-have the same dynamic underpinnings,. then we can reject the claim that opposing behaviors stem from opposing motives.
Although objective self-awareness theory can reinterpret past research on self-motivation, we would like to emphasize the theory's new predictions. We can only allude to some of the predictions here (see Duval & Silvia, 2001), but most of them concern the role of attributions in selfmotivation. We predicted that (self-focused) people who feel they can improve experienced reduced self-esteem because they attribute failure to self (Duval & Silvia, 2002); past work has argued that people simply brush off failure when they expect improvement (Dunning, 1995). We predict that attributions mediate between expecting to improve and trying to improve; other theories assume that improvement expectancies directly enhance motivation (Bandura, 1997; Carver & Scheier, 1998). Likewise, we predict when people will change standards rather than self, whereas other theories view standards as inflexible (Carver & Scheier, 1998; Higgins, 1987). And most significantly, we make predictions about when people will self-evaluate and when they will be unmotivated, whereas other theories imply that self-motivation is a continuous process (Sedikides & Strube, 1997). Many of our predictions have not yet been tested directly, and thus suggest directions for future research. We would particularly encourage direct tests of the self-awareness analysis of self-verification and self -assessment.
HOW MANY ANIMALS LIVE IN THE SELF-ZOO?
Tesser (2000) has described the social psychology of the self as a "selfzoo." Theories of the self abound-the price of admission to the self-zoo is merely the word self and a hyphen. In the interests of thinning the herd, we suggest that the social psychology of the self should emphasize the study of how the self relates to motivation and emotion. Social psychologists, like naive psychologists, want to know what people do-so how does the self relate to activity and experience? Ironically, the social psychology of the self started as the study of self and motivation, if we trace the field's roots to Aronson's (1969) self-esteem model of cognitive dissonance and Duval and Wicklund's (1972) original theory of objective selfawareness.
For this reason, there is much to respect about the self-motives approach, represented by the SCENT model (Sedikides & Strube, 1997). The study of self-motives has reoriented social psychologists toward issues of motivation, generated interesting research, and has brought issues of conflict back into self-motivation. Yet, we would like social psychology to view the self-motives model as a starting point rather than as a destination. Progress requires going beyond "different motives cause different behaviors." What are the core processes and mechanisms that lead people to accept or deny responsibility for negative events, to respond constructively or defensively to failure, to seek or avoid opportunities for improvement? What is the inner architecture of self-motivation?
Models look backward by inducting concepts from past observations; theories look forward by predicting new observations based on assumptions of how concepts should relate. By positing a few mechanisms capable of variation and interaction-like self-focused attention, standards, affect, and attributions-objective self-awareness theory enables complex predictions for superficially different but conceptually similar events. The theory accounts for existing findings and makes new predictions about self-motivated activity. In doing so, the theory unites seemingly different behaviors by showing their deeper dynamic continuities.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We would like to thank Jack Brehm, Scott Eidelman, Guido Gendolla, and Jeff Greenberg for their comments on earlier versions of this chapter.
Books we suggest:
Why We Do What We Do: Understanding Self-Motivation by Edward L. Deci, Richard Flaste (Paperback)
Mindfulness by Ellen J. Langer ( Paperback)
On Becoming an Artist : Reinventing Yourself Through Mindful Creativity by Ellen Langer ( Hardcover)
Mindfulness in Plain English, Updated and Expanded Edition by Dr. Bhante H. Gunaratana (Paperback)
Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (Paperback)
Beyond Boredom and Anxiety: Experiencing Flow in Work and Play by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
VITAL LIES SIMPLE TRUTHS: The Psychology of Self Deception by Daniel Goleman (Paperback)