The role of metamotivational knowledge in the regulation of motivation.

Abstract

Researchers from social and educational psychology have typically taken distinct approaches to investigating how individuals regulate their motivational states. The metamotivational framework that we describe in this article serves to bridge these approaches by drawing on insights from the literatures on metacognition and emotion regulation. Metamotivation refers to the psychological processes involved in monitoring and exerting control over one's motivational states. In contrast to prior approaches, which tend to concentrate on the strategies that individuals use to regulate the amount of motivation they have to pursue various goals (i.e., on motivation quantity), our metamotivational framework also focuses on how people determine which types of motivation (e.g., intrinsic vs. extrinsic, promotion vs. prevention, high-vs. low-level construal) are best suited for particular goals (i.e., on motivation quality). A central assumption of the framework is that people draw on at least three types of metamotivational knowledge when regulating the quantity and quality of their motivation: task knowledge, strategy knowledge, and self-knowledge. In this article, we provide a speculative account of how this occurs. We then review findings indicating that, on average, people have surprisingly accurate task and strategy knowledge about the adaptiveness of particular types of motivation for certain kinds of tasks (i.e., beliefs about task-motivation fit). The findings also suggest that individual differences in this knowledge may, at times, predict task performance and academic achievement. In the final section, we discuss some unexplored aspects of self-knowledge that could be the focus of new lines of metamotivational research.