there are two kinds of people in the world, . . . .
Chapter 9 presents our author’s views on mindsets (we will also consider cognitive dissonance, another cognitive perspective on motivation).
Mindset
- “a cognitive framework to guide one’s attention, information processing, decision making, and thinking about the meaning of effort, success, failure, and one’s own personal qualities.”
- “Once adopted, a mindset functions as a cognitive motivational system that produces important downstream consequences.”
- “The motivational systems coexist, but people tend toward one motivational system rather than the other.” (Reeve, 2018, p. 203)
- George Kelly’s personal construct theory of personality also viewed human cognitive processing as being based on fundamental perceptual dichotomies
- (In contrast to the ideas expressed in Ch 9, Kelly felt the categories were idiosyncratically constructed by each of us through our experiences, he would object to imposing the constructs of the researcher/clinician, such as “deliberative-implemental, and would have investigated the individual’s own constructs. His was a very cognitive view, he felt humans were inherently active [like your author] and felt little need for “motivational factors” in his theory.)
- Notice that this is a very “cognitive” view of motivational processes: how we perceive, think about, plan shapes our actions.
- other definitions of “mindset”
- A fixed mental attitude or disposition that predetermines a person’s responses to and interpretations of situations. (The Free Dictionary)
- A mental inclination, tendency, or habit. (Merriam-Webster.com – Medical Dictionary)
- A person’s usual attitude or mental state is his or her mindset. (Vocabulary.com)
- A person’s way of thinking and their opinions. (Cambridge Dictionary)
- An attitude, disposition, or mood. (Dictionary.com)
- The ideas and attitudes with which a person approaches a situation, esp when these are seen as being difficult to alter. (World English Dictionary.)
- The established set of attitudes held by someone. (Oxford Dictionary)
- related concepts:
- attitude: Oxford Dictionary: “An attitude is a settled way of thinking or feeling about someone or something, typically one that is reflected in a person’s behavior.”
- belief: Oxford Dictionary: “An acceptance that something exists or is true, especially one without proof.”, “Something one accepts as true or real; a firmly held opinion.”
- schema: Oxford Dictionary: “A representation of a plan or theory in the form of an outline or model”; online: “represent patterns of internal experience. This includes memories, beliefs, emotions, and thoughts.” Aaron Beck: “a schema is a structure for screening, coding, and evaluating the stimuli that impinge on the organism.” (Beck, 1967, p. 283), Beck credits Piaget with using this term in psychological sense.
- task set: “a configuration of cognitive processes that is actively maintianed for subsequent task perfomrance.” (Sakai, 2009, p 219). Daniel Kahneman sees the adoption of task sets as a, “crucial capacity of System 2”, “it can program memory to obay an instruction that overrides habitual responses.” (2011, p. 36), he notes that: “System 2 is the only one that can follow rules, compare objects on several attributes, and make deliberative choices between options. The automatic System 1 does not have these capabilities. Sysem 1 detects simple relations (“they are all alike,” “the son is much taller than the father”) and excels at integrating information about one thing, but it does not deal with multiple distinct topics at one, nor is it adept at using purely statistical information.” (p. 36).
- heuristic: a mental shortcut. Wikepedia: “is any approach to problem solving or self-discovery that employs a practical method that is not guaranteed to be optimal, perfect, or rational, but is nevertheless sufficient for reaching an immediate, short-term goal or approximation“
Our author uses the term “mindset” to refer to cognitive devices that guide decision making based on presumptions about the world and the value or effects of different types of outcomes. This seems very close to the way many clinicians (espectially cognitive, behavioral, or psychodynamic clinicans) use the term schema.
Ch. 9 considers there mindsets that have been studied by social and motivational psychologists:
Deliberative-Implemental
- Goal setting (motivation) and goal striving (volition)
- Motivation (“the energization and initial direction of behavior, and it involves all the predecisional process that energize and direct action” p. 203) and Volition (“concerns the ongoing maintenance and persistence of motivated action” p. 204)
- Deliberative mindset: thinking about what you want to do
- How desirable one goal is to another
- What is the most desirable thing to do?
- How attainable are these goals?
- “attention is cast wide” (brainstorming)
- The Implemental pole appears very similar to the “implementation intentions” of ch. 8
- “alternative goals are no longer considered” (p. 205)
- “the person is closed minded and attention is focused narrowly” (p. 205)
- Forecasted self-efficacy and personal control beliefs are increased
- Deliberative mindset: thinking about what you want to do
- Deliberative mindset more conducive to goal setting and Implemental mindset more conducive to goal striving
- Once in an implemental mindset a person will persist longer at a task, perform better, experience increased self-effcacy and personal control beliefs about eventual goal attainment.
Promotion-Prevention
- Regulatory focus theory: two separate and independent motivational orientations
- Promotion: sensitivity to positive outcomes
- Desired and ideal end states
- Failure is not motivating, success is
- Eager locomotion feels right: gain-based strategy
- Prevention: sensitivity to negative outcomes
- Maintain: duty, obligation, responsibility
- Success is the absence of loss, no change has occurred
- Success is not motivating, failure is
- Vigilant caution feels right: safety-based strategy
- Maintain: duty, obligation, responsibility
- Chronic/personality disposition (state) or situational (trait)
- “ought” and “ideals” as self-guides
- Regulatory fit: decisions and behaviors feel “right” to the person
- “both mindsets are actually necessary for optimal goal striving”, “speed and accuracy almost always trumps speed without accuracy or accuracy without speed” (p. 211)
- There are cultures where “do it quickly” and “do it well” make sense but “do it quickly and well” does not make sense.
Growth-Fixed
- Suggests that people think about their personal qualities in one of two ways
- Fixed, set qualities (entity theorists)
- High effort equals low ability
- Changeable qualities (incremental theorists)
- Both learned
- Achievement goals
- Fixed mindset (entry theorists) adopt performance goals: look smart and don’t look dumb
- Growth mindset (incremental theorists) adopt mastery goals: use task engagement to improve
- Mastery goals in achievement context associated with positive and productive ways of thinking, feeling, behaving; performance goals with relatively negative and unproductive say of thinking, feeling, behaving
- Adopting mastery goals leads to working harder, persisting longer, and performing better
- Avoidance motivation (fearing failure)
- Dispositional characteristics which predispose people to adopt performance- avoidance goals: neuroticism, poor life skills (poor social skills, poor time management)
- [avoidance is the major culprit leading to emotional distress and behavioral maladjustment in most current behavior and cognitive-behavioral therapies]
- Adopting mastery goals leads to working harder, persisting longer, and performing better
So, what do we make of these ideas?
- We can observe regularities in people’s behavior in certain situations, toward certain events/stimuli
- We can infer mental processes that appear to summarize these regularities and may allow us to predict future responses as well as reactions to certain experiences
- This may be useful in guiding our responses toward an individual (in education, therapy, and other endeavors of influence)
- It may be advantageous to maintain an, “as if” attitude toward these ideas.
- Assimilation and Accommodation: Piaget’s two views of how we handle discordant information
- Assimilation: we change information to fit our existing schemas (what we already know)
- Accommodation: we change our schemas in light of new information
Consider efforts to alter mindsets
- (informal efforts)
- Persuasion
- logical arguments
- emotional arguments
- brainwashing
- Persuasion
- (formal efforts)
- Advertising
- imagery and association
- Psychotherapy
- CBT: cognitive behavior therapy, cognitive therapy, rational emotive therapy
- Epictetus, “for what disturbs men’s minds is not events but their judgments on events”, “men are distusbed not by things, but by the view which they take of them”
- changing our thoughts to change our feelings and actions
- motivational interviewing: counseling approach orginally developed by William Miller and Stephen Rolinck to facilitate change in clients with substance use issues
- stages of change: model of the change process developed by James Prochaska and Carlo Dei Clemente in 1977, a part of the transtheoretical model of counseling
- precontemplation: not thinking about change or unwilling to consider change
- contemplation: open to possibility but ambivalent or uncertain
- preparation/determination: commitment to change but without definite plan
- action: effort to make overt change
- maintenance: work to stabilize new pattern
- CBT: cognitive behavior therapy, cognitive therapy, rational emotive therapy
- Education
- People think that feeling anxious while taking a standardized test will make them do poorly. However, recent research suggests that stress doesn’t hurt performance on these tests and can even help performance. People who feel anxious during a test might actually do better. This means that you shouldn’t feel concerned if you do feel anxious while taking today’s test. If you find yourself feeling anxious, simply remind yourself that your stress could be helping you do well. Jeremy Jamieson, cited in McGonigal, 2015 (p. 100)
- Advertising