Volitional Mediators of Cognition-Behavior Consistency: Self-Regulatory Processes and Action Versus State Orientation

Abstract

One of the most striking discrepancies between everyday experience and psychological theorizing concerns the complexity of motivational states. While most psychologists tend to focus on a single behavioral domain (e.g., achievement, affiliation, eating, learning, problemsolving, sex, etc.), we know from everyday experience that people very rarely seem to have just one behavioral inclination in a given situation. In everyday life people usually experience several motivational tendencies simultaneously and more often than not have multiple commitments to a variety of goals. At first glance our task — to explain and predict which of the competing action tendencies a person actually will implement in a given situation — seems to boil down to the objective of establishing the dominant (i. e., strongest) action tendency among all the competing tendencies (e. g., Atkinson & Birch, 1970).