Suchergebnisse

People often strive towards self-improvement, and whether they are currently motivated or lacking motivation can hinge on their social environment, namely on the people around them. Research on social comparison has emphasised the inspirational nature of upward comparisons, but has not covered the whole spectrum of possible comparison standards in terms of their motivational impact. The current dissertation integrates social comparison with motivational principles from self-regulation research and investigates how discrepancy assessments between the self and a standard of comparison influence people's motivation and emotion. Chapter 1 outlines the new framework of motivation by integrating literature on social comparison and self-regulation. In Chapter 2, a line of experimental studies shows how motivational patterns provoked by moderate (vs. extreme) upward (vs. downward) standards differ from classic assimilation and contrast judgments in the social comparison literature. Chapter 3 moves into the field, and demonstrates how discrepancy assessments between the self and a standard influence motivation and associated emotion, where a negative discrepancy (upward comparison) is associated with increased effort investment (pushing), but with decreased effort investment if the discrepancy becomes too large (disengagement). Positive discrepancies, on the other hand, are related to less effort investment as the standard has been surpassed (coasting). Chapter 4 complements the former chapter with a behavioral effort measure that assesses performance improvement of sports students after they have reported on their social comparisons during the semester. Lastly, Chapter 5 illustrates how the domain of morality deviates from the motivational framework as people draw motivation from downward and avoid upward comparison to positively distinguish their moral self from others. Finally, the last chapter offers concluding thoughts concerning implications, future research, and limitations of the current research.