Competence and effectance!
Competence: hunger satiation
Effectance: try to get to that state of competence.
‘joy in being the cause’
Describing animal behavior in emergency situations is just ONE ASPECT of human behavior. Humans are always looking for “something” more:
Our desire for mastery of the environment
Exploratory Behavior (exploration as a drive): secondary-reinforcement and anxiety reduction.
Activity & manipulation: a need for activity is demonstrated if an animal is deprived of movement.
Needs for excitement and novelty.
A child at play needs frequent novelty in the stimulus field to keep up his interest (maintain pleasant discrepancies)
Effectance:
Seek out novel experience because we are dissatisfied or bored
Evolutionary perspective: Organisms are more likely to survive in an environment which is CHANGING.
Trait that predisposes us to be flexible--to handle changes in our environment.
It's a good thing we go out and seek danger because it makes us more competent.
Boredom = just as likely to drive you crazy as over-stimulation.
Motivation to AVOID boredom = enhances growth.
Competence: not just through exploratory drives (although gets great contributions from it), also shows direction, selectivity, and persistence in interacting with the environment.
The experience produced by competency: FEELING OF EFFICACY.
Seizing & Freezing!
People are not just motivated by directional motivation, but rather also by non-directional motivation (to do more or less thinking in general).
HIGH NEED OF CLOSURE VS. HIGH NEED TO AVOID CLOSURE.
HNC = reply on underlying personality dispositions (rather than situational pressures) to explain behavior / more likely to judge based on first impressions / more likely to use stereotypes.
Closure: can be manipulated in a lab and is something which is an individual difference variable. People naturally have different levels of it.
HNC: people gain info crystallization occurs aka freezing. Once this happens, a HNC person locks in the belief and adopts a close-minded approach to any additional info. make snap judgments
LESS info processing / more cue utilization
Seek prototypical info
Early cue utilization
LNC: Usually delays forming a judgment & gathers as much info as possible.
Can’t decide what to order from the menu.
Seek diagnostic info
Difference between specific & non-specific closure:
Specific closure: desire to know a PARTICULAR answer to a question
Non-specific closure: desirability of an answer, as long as it is definite.
It comes down knowledge (which conveys welcome news in regard to a given concern or because it conveys definite news—whether welcome or unwelcome—in instances where info is required for some purpose.
Ex: a mum might want to know a child’s SAT score so she can send him to a specific college vs. an admissions offer want to know SAT score just to know how well / poorly he did so they can make a decision.
Need for closure instills:
1. Urgency tendency: the inclination to ‘seize’ on closure quickly.
2. Permanence tendency: desire to perpetuate closure…
To preserve or ‘freeze’ on past knowledge
To safeguard future knowledge
**LOOK AT EXPERIMENT ON PAGE 84
1. How does Kruglanski’s closure (high vs. high need to avoid) compare to Gollwitzer’s concepts of implementational vs. deliberate mindsets? / & what differences?
MOTIVATION’S EFFECT ON COGNITION
KUNDA, 1990
FESTINGER, 1961
‘Illusion of Objectivity’: People carefully build and manage their motivated cognition with an imagined audience in mind.
