Achievement motivation?
Achievement Goals and Information Seeking
Theorists have proposed that people’s achievement goals affect their achievement-related attitudes and behaviors. Two different types of achievement-related attitudes include task-involvement and ego-involvement. Task-involvement is a motivational state in which a person’s main goal is to acquire skills and understanding whereas the main goal in ego-involvement is to demonstrate superior abilities (Butler, 1999). One example of an activity where someone strives to attain mastery and demonstrate superior ability is schoolwork. However situational cues, such as the person’s environment or surroundings, can affect the success of achieving a goal at any time.
Studies confirm that a task-involvement activity more often results in challenging attributions and increasing effort (typically in activities providing an opportunity to learn and develop competence) than in an ego-involvement activity. Intrinsic motivation, which is defined as striving to engage in activity because of self-satisfaction, is more prevalent when a person is engaged in task-involved activities. When people are more ego-involved, they tend to take on a different conception of their ability, where differences in ability limit the effectiveness of effort. Ego-involved individuals are driven to succeed by outperforming others, and their feelings of success depend on maintaining self-worth and avoiding failure. On the other hand, task-involved individuals tend to adopt their conception of ability as learning through applied effort (Butler, 1999). Therefore less able individuals will feel more successful as long as they can satisfy an effort to learn and improve. Ego-invoking conditions tend to produce less favorable responses to failure and difficulty.
Competence moderated attitudes and behaviors are more prevalent in ego-involved activities than task-involved. Achievement does not moderate intrinsic motivation in task-involving conditions, in which people of all levels of ability could learn to improve. In ego-involving conditions, intrinsic motivation was higher among higher achievers who demonstrated superior ability than in low achievers who could not demonstrate such ability (Butler, 1999). These different attitudes toward achievement can also be compared in information seeking.
Task- and ego-involving settings bring about different goals, conceptions of ability, and responses to difficulty. They also promote different patterns of information seeking. People of all levels of ability will seek information relevant to attaining their goal of improving mastery in task-involving conditions. However they need to seek information regarding self-appraisal to gain a better understanding of their self-capacity (Butler, 1999). On the other hand people in ego-involving settings are more interested in information about social comparisons, assessing their ability relative to others.