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).
This Chapter was written during the author’s term as a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford, California. It is a pleasure to acknowledge helpful comments on an earlier draft by Jürgen Beckmann and Torgrim Gjesme.
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Kuhl, J. (1985). Volitional Mediators of Cognition-Behavior Consistency: Self-Regulatory Processes and Action Versus State Orientation. In: Kuhl, J., Beckmann, J. (eds) Action Control. SSSP Springer Series in Social Psychology. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-69746-3_6
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