Focusing on Helping Others Is Motivating

• In Event: Increasing Students’ Academic Motivation Through Social-Psychological Interventions

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to explore whether having minority students focus on helping other children will motivate them to improve their work when facing social and psychological threatening situations. A variety of academic interventions have been developed to help students sustain academic motivation and performance in the face of psychologically threatening or challenging circumstances. Such interventions typically focus on the self. For example, some interventions use self-affirmation to reduce the effects of stereotype threat (Cohen et al., 2006). Others focus on making alternate achieved identities salient (McGlone & Aronson, 2006). Some help students re-conceive the threatened self-domain such as one’s intelligence (Aronson et al, 2002; Good et al., 2003). Despite differences in method, all of these approaches involve an explicit focus on the self to counter threat and increase motivation. Moreover, these approaches clearly do not work under all situations.
Recently, we have begun to experiment with an alternative approach that appears to boost motivation in the face of threat—focusing on helping others. We report the effects of one study in which minority college students wrote essays about the value of college for potential publication in a book. They then received negative (but constructive) feedback from a white expert evaluator aware of the essay writer’s race. Students were informed that their essay needed a lot of work to be considered for publication. This is a situation that typically produces demotivation (Cohen & Steele, 2002; Crocker & Major), as students tend to discount the feedback as racially biased in order to protect their own self-esteem. In this experiment, however, half the students were informed that their essays would be shared with 10 year old minority students who might be encouraged by them. This was predicted to help students maintain motivation by focusing them on a cause larger than themselves (the well being of children). The key dependent variable is whether students revised and resubmitted their essays. The results indicated that when students believed their essays might benefit other children, they were up to six times as likely to revise and resubmit their essays.

Author

• Joshua M. Aronson, New York University