The Impact of Regulatory Fit on Experienced Autonomy

Abstract

This research sought to test the hypothesis that regulatory fit enhances people’s feelings of autonomy. Regulatory fit can be created by prompting people to execute a task using means of task execution that fit (vs. do not fit) their preferred means of goal-pursuit. Assigning people to do a task using a particular means implies they do not exercise choice in applying their preferred means of goal-pursuit. Nevertheless, we reasoned that fitting task means would lead to higher feelings of autonomy while working on a task because, under conditions of regulatory fit, people are using the means that they would have chosen if they had been given choice. We conducted 10 experiments (total N = 3,124) to test the effect of regulatory fit versus regulatory non-fit on experienced autonomy and a meta-analysis of the effects supported our hypothesis for both promotion focus-based fit and prevention focus-based fit.