Inspiration, Motivation and Why We Do What We Do
Why do kids look up to sports-stars as their idols instead of activists and authors? Well that’s obvious, you may say, it’s because sports are cool and school stuff like English and Humanitarianism are for nerds. Well…. Yeah…. You’re right…
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But there’s also other interesting factors going on here so let us learn something new about motivation, inspiration, and role modelling!
Motivation is one of those things that humans struggle with through their whole lives, middle-aged house-husbands/wives and 35-year-olds-in-Lycra-who-think-they’re-still-25 read a bajillion self-help books a year, just trying to figure out how to convince themselves to get off their butts and do something. Why is it that we have so much difficulty just encouraging ourselves to do something worthwhile? The scientific community in general agrees that deciding to do something, and to trying to do it well, relies on two things, value and expectancy. This theory (aptly named the expectancy-value theory) essentially says that we do something a) because we think we will be able to; and b) because we want to. Absolutely ground-breaking research here, I know. According to the theory, we have expectancies about whether or not something can be achieved or not before we even start, and it is this expectancy which will ultimately decide if/how well we do it. In the context of school, this essentially means that if you think you’re horrible at maths and that you’re going to fail the upcoming test, you probably won’t do as well as if you think that you’re going to do terrifically. The second part of the theory (the ‘value’ part) says that you’re only going to do something if it has value you to you. It breaks this down into four types of values: attainment, intrinsic, utility and cost. These simply translate to, “I want to improve myself”, “I intrinsically enjoy this”, “I am going to get something out of this” and “This is the cheapest option”, respectively. Which brings us back to the point of sport versus school stuff. Why do teenagers lose interest in school? Because their motivating factors move from attainment and intrinsic to utility and cost. Teenagers don’t care about learning, they care about getting good grades, much at the fault of the schooling system. By forcing students to aim for a good ATAR (or equivalent) instead of doing what they enjoy, school makes teenagers lose all motivation and intrinsic curiosity. But that’s a long-complicated discussion for another time, so let us move on.
A 2010 research paper, “A Meta-Analytic Review of Achievement Goal Measures: Different Labels for the Same Constructs or Different Constructs with Similar Labels?” (Hulleman et al., 2010), went into more detail defining the difference in motivating factors I just spoke about whilst putting more weight on its significance. This study concluded that all ‘achievement goals’ (goals to achieve something, once again these naming systems really challenge you intellectually) can be categorised into two main groups (and four subgroups which I won’t bore you with because time is precious). These two types of achievement goals are mastery goals and performance goals, which can be quickly explained by “I want to do this so I can improve myself” and “I want to do this because I want to win”. They’re very similar in concept to extrinsic and intrinsic goals, but with key differences. The paper mentioned above used an example to make this distinction clear — the extrinsic goal of getting an ‘A’ on a test can be ether performance oriented, “get the ‘A’ because it shows I’m better than others” or mastery oriented “get the ‘A’ because it shows I have mastered the subject”. So, with school versus sport, we lose motivation at school because we are pushed to do subjects we don’t enjoy and given the only motivation of achieving good marks to hopefully have a good future, rather than actually wanting to learn. In sport we stay motivated because out goal isn’t ONLY to outperform others (although this is definitely a part of it) or succeed in a test, but also simply to master the sport and become great. This is where the big guys come in, our role-models, our inspirations.
Every child wants to become the next Ronaldo, the next Ali, the next Cathy Freeman, the next (sorry I don’t know footy or cricket players) and it is this celebrity status that we place on sports-people that adds so much to the motivation for children to love and play sports. It converts our desire of beating the rest into being the best. It makes us want to not only DO good, but to BE good. Role-models motivate us by giving us both mastery and performance goals. Another research article, published in 2015, “The Motivational Theory of Role- Modelling: How Role-Models Influence Role Aspirants’ Goals” (Morgenroth, Ryan and Peters, 2015), recognised three distinct functions of a role model: “acting as behavioural models, representing the possible, and being inspirational”. The first refers to the way role models show us how to do the things we want to do, the second refers to how role models show us what we could become (giving us both performance and mastery goals) and the last simply refers to the inspiration the role models provide. From this it is easy to see why giving sportspeople a celebrity status, they can become very attractive role-models. The paper also identifies that we must be able to see ourselves in role-models, which is definitely something we can do with sports-people, who many of which even went to the same schools as us.
So, what makes sports-people such good role models compared to so-called “inspirational figures”? As I’ve outlined above, it’s because they’re cool, they do something teenagers are interested in, they are good at what they do, we can take learn skills from them, they represent what we can become, and they’re just darn inspirational. On top of this they provide multiple types of inspiration and give us all kinds of motivating goals.
Resources:
Websites:
En.wikipedia.org. (2018). Expectancy-value theory. [online] Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expectancy-value_theory [Accessed 31 Jul. 2018].
Journals:
Hulleman, C., Schrager, S., Bodmann, S. and Harackiewicz, J. (2010). A meta-analytic review of achievement goal measures: Different labels for the same constructs or different constructs with similar labels?. Psychological Bulletin, 136(3), pp.422–449.
Morgenroth, T., Ryan, M. and Peters, K. (2015). The motivational theory of role modeling: How role models influence role aspirants’ goals. Review of General Psychology, 19(4), pp.465–483.