Autonomous motivation promotes goal attainment through the conscious investment of effort, but mental contrasting with implementation intentions makes goal striving easier

ABSTRACT

People with autonomous motives (e.g., personal importance) may use automated strategies to effortlessly sustain goal-directed behavior and overcome obstacles. We investigated whether conscious effort, ease of goal striving, physiological effort, and the number of obstacles encountered mediate relations between motives and goal attainment for a competitive cycling goal. Additionally, half the participants (n = 57) were trained in Mental Contrasting with Implementation Intentions (MCII) – a technique that facilitates development of goal-directed behavior – with remaining participants (n = 54) treated as controls. Conscious investment of effort mediated relations between autonomous motives and goal attainment. Subjective ease of goal striving and physiological effort did not. This result indicates that successful goal striving is not perceived as effortless for autonomously motivated individuals working on competitive goals. Conversely, MCII predicted a reduction in obstacles, which in turn was associated with easier goal striving but not goal attainment. Although MCII did not support goal attainment in the current study, its ability to minimize the influence of obstacles may still be useful for other types of goals or for sustaining long-term goal pursuit.

KEYWORDS:

• Motivation
• effort
• obstacles

Acknowledgments

We would like to acknowledge Scott Dunk for assisting with data collection. We would like to thank the Curtin Hub for Immersive Visualisation and eResearch (HIVE) for hosting the testing for this research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

All data and materials associated with this project are publicly available on the project’s OSF page (https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/P7BWU).

Open Scholarship

This article has earned the Center for Open Science badges for Open Data and Open Materials through Open Practices Disclosure. The data and materials are openly accessible at https://doi.org/10.1080/00224545.2022.2163610.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/00224545.2022.2163610

Notes

1. Self-reported effort could have been influenced by the race outcome (e.g., participants who lost the race may have inferred they did not give enough effort). We conducted an exploratory analysis using the time difference between a participant’s personal best trial and their race trial as an alternative measure of goal performance. The model, however, provided a poor fit to the data (χ²(16) = 21.31, p = .17; RMSEA = .06 [95% CI = .00 – .11]; SRMR = .04; CFI = 0.87; (Hu & Bentler, 1999; Ximénez et al., 2022). We also tested a model controlling for attainment expectancy and goal importance on goal attainment/progress to account for participants’ perceived competence and attachment to the goal. Again, model fit was poor (χ²(20) = 28.98, p = .09; RMSEA = .07 [95% CI = .00 – .12]; SRMR = .04; CFI = 0.85). Model misfit can produce biased parameter estimates (Lai, 2018). Consequently, we do not interpret these results further.

Additional information

Funding

This study is part of a research project grant awarded by the Australian Research Council (DP200101555) to Nikos Ntoumanis.