Subconscious Motivation Flashcards
What factors influence goal achievement?
Strength of your intention (20-35%)
Conscious thoughts, values, and mindset
Subconscious thoughts, values and intentions (see implementation intentions and mental contrasting)
What is an implementation intention?
An implementation is how you are going to approach your goal, how are you going to get there. These are called implementation intentions, which are the if-then plans of your approach.
Why are implementation intentions useful?
Implementation intentions can help us reach our goals and overcome internal and external barriers. This allows us to conquer our goals even if we are low on willpower, or if the people around us are not supporting us in our efforts. The implementation intentions can help us when we are tired or in a bad mood, and they can help us avoid indulging in distractions. Implementation intentions do all of this by helping us strategically automate the recognition of opportunities and the behaviour that follows (Gollwitzer., 2014).
What does an implementation intention look like?
The goal intention would state: I want to achieve X.
The implementation intention would state: If I encounter situation Y, then I will perform behaviour Z.
The “if” part of this statement could either reference an opportunity to initiate positive behaviour or an obstacle that could derail you from your target. The “then” portion references a response of a feeling, a behaviour, or a thought (Bieleke, Keller 7 Gollwitzer.,
2020).
What are two common goal-setting pitfalls that you can address with implementation intentions?
- It is hard to start – we battle to initiate our goal-directed behaviours and we don’t identify the right
opportunities. - Then once we have started our goal striving, we can get distracted or derailed and antagonistic habits get in our way
What goal-setting pitfall is mental contrasting particularly useful for?
Procrastination.
Just setting goals is not enough to decrease procrastination and unfortunately adding implementation intentions has given mixed results.
Mental contrasting helps to overcome procrastination because instead of just thinking about how to achieve this goal (also called indulging), you actually follow this up by thinking of critical obstacles that could derail you from your wishes and plans to overcome these obstacles.
What is mental contrasting?
Mental contrasting helps us pursue our goals through cognitive as well as motivational mechanisms. You have determined your goal and have thought about why this would be beneficial to you. Now, instead of just thinking about how to achieve this goal (also called indulging), you need to actually follow this up by thinking of critical obstacles that could derail you from your wishes and plans to overcome these obstacles. This strategy emphasizes reality and the need to act, and with that strengthens goal commitment to future desires.
What role do reward and punishment play in subconscious motivation/
In everyday life, we are constantly making decisions in which we weigh the trade-offs between immediate and delayed rewards (or costs). What this trade-off differs between people and, within people, differs between situations. This is something that we can work on and change. Most research currently supports mindfulness-based training and placing a focus on the future (aka planning!).
What is selective attention?
Selective attention refers to our ability to guide our attention and focus on something while
ignoring other inputs.
How does selective attention help with goal achievement?
Setting implementation intentions plays into this ability to switch attention when needed. It makes the pre-defined cues more salient, which means that they are more likely to travel to the forefront of our attention, even when we are paying attention to something else. This is important as this cue identification then initiates the planned follow up behaviour.
What is the bidding model of attention?
The bidding model of attention suggests that there is a
bidding process where each piece of information produces a bid for conscious attention. Each sensory input channel takes in data and produces an estimate of the event’s magnitude and importance. This bid is weighed by your subconscious, and these bids are integrated based on their importance and relevance. Only the winning combination of inputs makes it to your conscious awareness. In turn, the inputs that make it to your conscious awareness serve as the basis for further behaviour.
How does the bidding model or attention relate to subconscious motivation?
It is easy to see how selective attention fits into this bidding model. By selecting specific criteria for intention (including implementation intentions) we tell our subconscious which of the bids for our attention we want to weigh more heavily.
What is priming?
In psychology, priming is the study of our unconscious responses to stimuli in our environment. When one stimulus influences our response to a subsequent situation without our conscious guidance or intention, this is known as priming. The first stimulus primed us
to respond in a certain way, but we were not consciously aware of this effect. So, although priming occurs unconsciously, it gets us ready to notice certain things and to feel and act in certain ways.
What are some ways you can prime your world?
Priming with words, priming with images, priming with objects, priming your environment.
What are the hidden past, hidden present and hidden future?
Our conscious experience, Bargh argues, is made up of our past, our present, and our future and how they interact in our brain. We have access to the unhidden past, present, and future in the form of memory, experience, and expectations. But in addition to this conscious experience, we also have a hidden past, present, and future that impact our behaviour.
