Motivation III Goals & Attribution
15 important questions on Motivation III Goals & Attribution
What is goal setting?
•Selecting or being allocated a goal in the belief this will enhance performance
Does goal setting work?
–79% of studies show positive effect (Burton & Naylor 2002)
–9 out of 11 interventions support use of goal setting in sport (Burton & Weiss (2008)
–Athletes rate goals as ‘moderately effective’
-> overall, goal setting does seem to work but the effect sizes seems to be less (small to medium effect sizes as opposed to big effect sizes in industry)
What are the most effective goals for an athlete to enhance their performance?
- Goal Type:
- Performance and process goals (task orientated goals) are better then outcome goals
- Goal Specificity
- Specific goals are more effective than general ‘do-your-best’ instructions
- Goal Difficulty
- Goals should be realistic but challenging: Optimal Goals (the achievement goal theory suggests athletes should set optimal goals)
- Goal Proximity
- Short term goals are flexible and allow for many achievement situations. If you only have one long term end goal, you only have on opportunity for achievement which is less likely to be motivational than multiple short term goals
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What did Burton & Naylor (2002) find?
HOWEVER these studies confound goal difficulty with specificity. A specific goal may be different in difficulty to a general goal (i.e. do your best goal)
-> issues with interpreting these results
-> the methodology isn't very good, the effects for sport is mixed
= evidence is inconclusive
What did Burton & Weiss (2008) find?
Goals seem to be effective, but evidence for the importance of specific factors is mixed (a part from goal proximity for which their is strong supporting evidence). Why do you think this is?
•Most studies compare goal conditions to no-goal conditions - this is a problem because particularly in sports, people in no-goal groups often spontaneously adopt goals and there is no way of knowing how these goals are characterised
-> Makes interpreting null effects very difficult
What are ways of knowing whether you have achieved your goal?
- Self-evaluation
- Feedback from others (coaches, peers etc.)
-> maintains sense of self efficacy which maintains motivation
What did Burton et al. (2007) find?
FO athletes set fewer goals, rate goals as less effective and were less committed than SO or PO athletes
-> evidence of athletes who have a goal setting style that is negative by making them less likely to compete, seek out easier goals, and avoid difficult goals
How do athletes explain the outcome of their sporting activity?
- Internality
- Stability
- Controllability
- Globality
How do winners and losers differ in their attributions? What is this difference known as?
•Winners focus on internal attributions
•Losers make more external, unstable attributions
-> You attribute positive outcomes to yourself and negative outcomes to unstable, external factors -> this is known as a ‘self serving bias’
How can success and failure attributions be measured?
Sport Attributional Style Questionnaire (Hanrahan et al., 1989)
Who studied how attributions can effect performance?
Hanrahan et al. (2003)
• Optimistic attributional style for positive events associated with higher self and coach ratings of performance.
• Particularly true of ego-oriented athletes (Optimistic attributional style interacted with achievement orientation)
• Pessimistic attributional style unrelated to performance (differences in literature regarding this aspect)
-> ego-oriented athletes tended to benefit more from optimistic attributional style because it reinforces their sense of self-efficacy
How can you re-train the pessimistic attributions of an athlete to optimistic attributions?
•Emphasis is on changing attributions of failure
-> if the athlete has a pessimistic attributional style, the CBT will train the athlete to attribute successes to internal, stable causes and attribute failures to external, unstable causes
What are problems with attribution literature?
- Studies don't always account for subjective measures. Athletes tend to use subjective measures of success which can be hard to define - i.e they didn’t ask Ps was what there concept of failure and success was
- Limited evidence that attribution re-training enhances performance (as seen in Orbach, Singer & Price's (1999) study)
- Attribution style often assessed using interviews/questionnaires
–Its not always clear what is meant by certain words or phrases
–Is “my opponent played better” a stable or unstable attribution? – there is ambiguity in how people interpret the questions and the answers
What is the summary of this lecture regarding attributions?
•Attributional style may affect both motivation and performance (but we saw that interventions aiming to specifically change attribution style didn't seem to produce benefits in performance)
•Maladaptive styles associated with poor performance (although again, we haven't seen evidence in the experimental manipulations)
•Attribution re-training can encourage more adaptive attributions (be careful with this as this is only from one study)
•However, limited evidence that this retraining improves performance
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