Intrinsic Motivation and Self-Determination in Human Behavior

What our history has been! We have come to know what a movement is, we have won a cease-fire. We, as a cooperative, now we know what it is to be free. Land Defense Committee, Las Marias, 1992 Why did campesinos in Tenancingo and Usulutan support the FMLN and join insurgent organizations, despite the high costs of doing so? The Salvadoran insurgency was about land. Perhaps access to land, a key material interest of campesinos , accounts for why so many campesinos participated in the insurgency, thereby resolving the puzzle of collective action posed in the opening pages of this book. However, at the time the insurgent cooperatives were formed, residents of the case-study areas had access to land whether or not they participated, as long as they refrained from informing on insurgent activities and made occasional material contributions (which they also had to make to passing government forces). Thus during the middle and later years of the civil war, it was possible for those who did not support the rebels to reside in the case-study areas as “free riders” on the benefits of the insurgency. The benefits included improved working conditions in some areas and unprecedented access to land and freedom from the often capricious authority of landlords and security forces in others. But none of these benefits required participating in the insurgency beyond the coerced minimum contribution. In short, the material benefits of the insurgency took the form of a public good that was available to all residents.

Although the role of motivation has been emphasized in the field of unemployment and job search, the motivational dynamics underlying unemployed individuals’ behavior have not yet received the attention they deserve. In this chapter, we present a motivational perspective grounded in self-determination theory (SDT), a macrotheory focusing on human motivation in the social context. We discuss basic principles of SDT and formulate seven propositions that have direct relevance for the fields of unemployment and job search. In discussing these propositions, we elucidate similarities and differences between SDT and various frameworks in the unemployment and job search literature and cover the available empirical evidence in the realm of SDT in these fields. Given that the literatures on job search and unemployment have been developed fairly independently, we conclude that SDT represents a promising theory to bridge these two fields and may equally provide useful guidelines for practitioners in the field.

REASONS FOR PHYSICAL ACTIVITY AND EXERCISE PARTICIPATION IN SENIOR ATHLETES Deborah Lynne Fife Department of Exercise Sciences Master of Science Research on motives of physical activity and exercise in the elderly is limited. This study used the Participation Motivation Questionnaire for Older Adults (PMQOA) to assess reasons for engaging in regular physical activity in participants of the 2007 Hunstman World Senior Games. The 259 subjects ranged from ages 50 to 85 years and were divided into tertiles based on frequency of exercise, determined by weekly exercise time and days. The most commonly reported reasons for exercise were to stay healthy, keep physically fit, and stay in shape. A previously conducted factor analysis on the PMAOQ revealed six underlying factors given for engaging in regular exercise: social, fitness, recognition, challenge/benefits, medical and involvement. Analysis of variance indicated significant differences in reasons for exercise between exercise tertiles and three factors; social, fitness, and challenge/benefits. There were also significant differences in reasons given for exercise between gender for the medical and social factors. Bivariate correlations indicated associations between both BMI and fitness perceptions with some PMQOA factors. Additionally, significant correlations were found between the six PMQOA factors, the strongest being between challenge/benefits, recognition, involvement, and social.

This study undertakes an in-depth investigation of the learning experience of selected visitors to three Australian museums. The research questions guiding the study were: Central Research Question: What is the essence of the learning experience in history museums? Sub-questions: 1. What is the essential structure of the museum learning experience? 2. What are the constituent elements of that essential structure? 3. How is meaning created by the visitor during the museum learning experience? 4. What are the key implications for the management and marketing of museums arising from an understanding of the above? Having established from the literature the importance of learning to the museum experience and emotion to such learning, the methodology assumes an emergent construction progressing through three separate but interrelated qualitative phases. The first two assume a broadly ethnographic approach while the third, in an attempt to achieve a deeper understanding, adopts a hermeneutic phenomenological approach referring in particular to the work of Husserl, Heidegger and Van Manen. The research incorporates a range of investigative methods including preparation of Personal Meaning Maps (Falk, 2002); audio recording of participant visit conversations; and in-depth interviews during a ‘return to the experience’ by individual participants and the researcher immediately subsequent to the visit. The first two stages identifies learning to have occurred by way of a number of principal concepts around which the data is grouped as well as a series of

The importance of student motivation within a student’s educational career can be viewed as a cornerstone to effective pedagogy and student learning. Xiang, Lee and Shen (2001) have indicated that as student’s progress throughout the K-12 system, their level of motivation tends to decrease. As such, a question of intrigue is whether teachers within different grade levels provide different  motivational instruction. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to examine the differences between primary and secondary educators ability to provide a motivationally-supportive learning context. Grounded within the self-determination theory (SDT; Deci & Ryan, 1985), this study utilized a quantitative approach to examine grade level differences in instruction and student motivation. Data were analyzed using a one-way MANOVA of teacher perceptions and two one-way ANOVA’s of student scores. Results indicated a significant difference between primary and secondary teaching and student motivation.

The goals of this chapter are (1) to introduce important theories and concepts which are employed in the discussion on the hypotheses of incentive and sorting effects in Chap. 4, (2) to introduce existing economic frameworks in order to get an overview of potential contingencies concerning incentive and sorting effects, and (3) to identify literature gaps in the observation of contingency variables and develop an integrative framework of variables under investigation in the experiment. The integrative framework guides the discussion on the experimental design in Chap. 3 particularly concerning environmental variables and is specified in Chaps. 4 and 5 particularly concerning individual variables. The three goals are addressed in the subsequent three sub-sections.

Adolescent depression is a major public health concern, prevalence estimates of which indicate that from 9.5% (Costello, Mustillo, Erkanli, Keeler, & Angold, 2003) to 11.7% (Merikangas et al., 2010) of adolescents may experience at some point; these depressive episodes have been linked to numerous physiological, psychological, educational and general functioning deficits. Although children and adolescents are known to be the subject of harsh stigmatizing beliefs (Perry, Pescosolido, Martin, McLeod, & Jensen, 2007), little research has been conducted on adolescents’ perceptions of mental health focused stigma experiences and coping mechanisms. Stigma experiences such as those experienced by persons with Mental Health (MH) concerns can lead many to manage the disclosure of their potentially stigmatizing feature, often choosing to conceal those features which can be concealed (Wahl, 1999b). The Visibility Management (VM) concept seeks to explain some of the underlying processes in how individuals cope with stigma through the manipulation of disclosure, allowing them to decide who in their lives is emotionally “safe” to disclose to, versus who may react negatively to such disclosure (e.g., stigma), resulting in concealment. This project sought to explore the processes by which depressed adolescents engaged in VM within the relationships of those other persons whom they consider important. This study of seven female adolescents with depression employed a multi-modal data gathering technique consisting primarily of qualitative interviews and utilized an innovative hand-on activity focused on the perceived strengths and weaknesses of the adolescent’s individualized social network. As a part of this process, I paid special attention to any reported incidences of the concept of a strategizing partner (Safe Other), reflecting a potential socially-based resource to depressed adolescents as originally described in the popular culture literature of the Autism Spectrum Disorder community. Subsequent between- and within-case analyses revealed that participants engaged in a complex decision-making process aimed at balancing their daily needs with the perceived burden their disclosure placed on others in their lives. This process often resulted in partial disclosure of their depression status. Finally, this work identified trends regarding the designation, utilization, and evaluation of a Safe Other indicating relevant directions for future research.

Educational games have proliferated, but questions remain about the effectiveness at teaching both in the shortand long-term. Also unclear is whether particular game features have positive effects on learning. To examine these issues, this paper describes a controlled experiment using an educational game that was professionally developed to teach about cognitive biases in decision making (Fundamental Attribution Error, Confirmation Bias, and Bias Blind Spot). This experiment examined the effects of game art and narrative on learning and compared the game conditions to a training video. Effects were measured immediately after the stimuli were given and then again eight weeks later. Results indicate that the educational game outperforms the training video immediately after exposure and that there are significant retention effects. Art and narrative were not significantly related to learning with the exception that minimal art game had a significant positive relationship with mitigating Bias Blind Spot at immediate post-test.

Online review has become an important repository for consumers to make online buying decisions. However, writing online reviews is a voluntary behavior lacking guidelines and it is hard to guarantee the review quality generated. How to improve online review quality has become a challenge to online retailers and review aggregators. In this study, we explore the design of review writing interface in order to provide engaging writing experience for online reviewers. Using the motivational affordance theory as the theory basis, we define the motivational factors and corresponding design elements, which support reviewers to fulfill their motivation to write their online reviews. We explore how the engaging experience supported by cognitive and social affordances will affect reviewers’ writing performance.

This study examined the effect of motivational primes on participants ( N = 171) during a cycling task. Relative to participants primed with a controlled motivational orientation, it was hypothesized that participants primed for autonomous motivation would report greater feelings of enjoyment, effort, and choice in relation to the cycling activity and report greater exercise intentions. Members of the autonomous prime group were expected to exercise for longer, at a greater percentage of their heart rate maximum, and report lower levels of perceived exertion than those in the controlled prime condition. It was found that, relative to participants in the controlled prime group, those who received the autonomous prime enjoyed the exercise more, exercised at a greater percentage of heart rate maximum, and reported a lower rating of perceived exertion. Furthermore, participants experiencing the controlled prime exercised for less time and had lower intentions to exercise than did other participants. Results highlight the importance of automatic processes in activating motivation for exercise.