A social-cognitive approach to motivation and personality.

TLDR

Past research has identified mastery‑oriented and helpless patterns of adaptive and maladaptive behavior, and scholars aim to link these patterns to underlying psychological processes. The study proposes a research‑based model that explains major behavioral patterns, tests its generality across domains, and explores its broader implications for motivation and personality. The model posits that individuals’ implicit theories guide goal orientation, which in turn generates distinct behavioral patterns, and it is tested for generality across diverse domains and contextualized within broader motivational theory. The authors demonstrate that cognitive, affective, and behavioral features of adaptive and maladaptive patterns directly stem from differing goal orientations.

Abstract

Past work has documented and described major patterns of adaptive and maladaptive behavior: the mastery-oriented and the helpless patterns. In this article, we present a research-based model that accounts for these patterns in terms of underlying psychological processes. The model specifies how individuals' implicit theories orient them toward particular goals and how these goals set up the different patterns. Indeed, we show how each feature (cognitive, affective, and behavioral) of the adaptive and maladaptive patterns can be seen to follow directly from different goals. We then examine the generality of the model and use it to illuminate phenomena in a wide variety of domains. Finally, we place the model in its broadest context and examine its implications for our understanding of motivational and personality processes. The task for investigators of motivation and personality is to identify major patterns of behavior and link them to underlying psychological processes. In this article we (a) describe a research-based model that accounts for major patterns of behavior, (b) examine the generality of this model—its utility for understanding domains beyond the ones in which it was originally developed, and (c) explore the broader implications of the model for motivational and personality processes.