The Relationship between Metamotivational Knowledge and Performance

Abstract

Self-regulation research increasingly highlights the performance trade-offs of different motivational states. For instance, eager motivation promotes performance on divergent creativity tasks (e.g., brainstorming), and vigilant motivation (e.g., proofreading) promotes performance on convergent analytic tasks. Recent work on metamotivation – people’s understanding and regulation of their motivational states – shows that, on average, people demonstrate accurate knowledge of how to create such task-motivation fit for eager and vigilant tasks; at the same time, there is significant variability in this accuracy (Scholer & Miele, 2016). The present research examines whether having accurate metamotivational knowledge predicts performance. Results revealed that more accurate metamotivational knowledge predicted better performance on proofreading and brainstorming tasks, though there was variability in the robustness of this effect across studies. Potential implications of this variability are discussed. By demonstrating the role of metamotivational knowledge in performance, this research offers novel insights for metamotivation research and highlights the advantages of taking a metamotivational approach to studying self-regulation.