Motivating Goal-Directed Behavior Through Introspective Self-Talk
By I. Senay, Dolores Albarracin, K. Noguchi. 2010
75 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Although essential for psychology, introspective self-talk has rarely been studied with respect to its effects on behavior. Nevertheless, the interrogative compared with the declarative form of introspective talk may elicit more intrinsically motivated reasons for action, resulting in goal-directed behavior. In Experiment 1, participants were more likely to solve anagrams if they prepared for the task by asking themselves whether they would work on anagrams as opposed to declaring that they would. In the next three experiments, merely writing Will I as opposed to I will as part of an ostensibly unrelated handwriting task produced better anagram-solving performance and stronger intentions to exercise, which suggests that priming the interrogative structure of self-talk is enough to motivate goal-directed behavior. This effect was found to be mediated by the intrinsic motivation for action and moderated by the salience of the word order of the primes.
Subfields: Applied Psychology, Sociology and Political Science, Cognitive Science & Psychology
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Citations in the corpus
- Inner Speech: Development, Cognitive Functions, Phenomenology, and Neurobiology (2015, background): “For instance, Senay, Albarracín, and Noguchi (2010) compared the impact of interrogative and declarative self-talk on participants’ anagram performance and intention to exercise.”
- “I Don’t” versus “I Can’t”: When Empowered Refusal Motivates Goal-Directed Behavior (2012, methodology): “For instance, language influences persuasion (Mayer and Tormala 2010), categorical perception (Schmitt and Zhang 1998), sensory perception and discrimination (Hoegg and Alba 2007), perceived durations of time intervals (Cheema and Patrick 2008), future behavior (Senay et al. 2010), and even health o”
- Self-talk: Review and sport-specific model (2016, background): “Senay, Albarracin, and Noguchi (2010) compared the effects of interrogative self-talk (i.e., “Will I?”) to that of the simple future tense (i.e., “I will”) and found that use of the interrogative form, led to superior task performance.”