Sense of belonging has long been recognized as a fundamental psychological need and essential component of achievement motivation and socioemotional thriving. However, research on school belonging has only recently begun to examine the barriers to, supports for, and experiences of belonging among racially marginalized students of color within U.S. schools and universities. Further, motivation science has a limited understanding of what belonging means, how it is internalized, and what shapes it for such students of color. In this article, we evaluate the developmental trends in school belonging research conducted with racially marginalized student populations. Through our review, we identify and describe three distinct and consecutive trends of school belonging research: assimilationist, reformist, and sociopolitical, as well as the ideological and methodological characteristics of each trend. Further, we employ critical race and optimal distinctiveness theories as conceptual guides to assess the affordances and limits of each trend and how the literature has evolved across these three trends. Finally, we offer insights for responsibly advancing school belonging research in ways that authentically address the needs of racially marginalized student groups and honor the cultural and contextual nuance of their lived experiences.
What do we want to know about ourselves, how do we ensure we only learn what we want to know, and does it matter if we know less than the truth? This chapter reviews research from our lab which uses a combination of psychology, neuroscience, and computational modeling to understand the factors and mechanisms which contribute to distorted self-evaluation and its consequences. Most of our research has focused on understanding the creation, maintenance, and consequences of overly positive self-evaluation. We have currently identified at least two distinct pathways that lead to flattering self-views: one that is in the service of protecting one's self-esteem and one that is not centered around self-esteem concerns. Although these pathways may not significantly differ in cognitive cost, they are associated with different neural profiles. For example, greater frontal lobe activation is associated with overly positive self-views in the face of self-esteem threat, whereas less involvement of the orbitofrontal cortex is associated with overly positive self-views when self-esteem threat is not salient. Furthermore, flattering self-views arise from distortions which can occur both early and late in the information processing stream. For example, ERP research suggests that people are not concealing knowledge of their flaws so much as they are less likely to encode them in the first place. Finally, we call for future research which more systematically investigates the interplay of the various motivations which influence self-evaluation and for more concerted effort to identify the conditions, people, and timing for which various motivations are beneficial or costly.
Rational Choice Theory (RCT) or the Rational Model effectively guides or determines much of the built world. It is a cornerstone of economics, sociology, political science, and public policy, drawing on the principles that we are self-interested and seek to maximize our utility or well-being. RCT defines decision-making using a series of mathematical tenets or axioms, adeptly enabling mathematical modeling. However, when and to what degree do these axioms accurately describe our decision making? Often, proofs regarding RCT are unfalsifiable or examples of the logical fallacy of Affirming the Consequent, being equally applicable to almost every other motivational theory. Here, we review limitations to RCT and establish ten boundary conditions for when it has greater or less verisimilitude, including variations in individuals' traits and states, the nature of tasks, and environmental scaffolding or structure. Acknowledging these boundary conditions and acting upon them improves the performance of RCT, making ideological adherence to RCT evermore self-defeating. Ideally, the field increasingly includes agent-based modeling and simulation (ABMS), which is better able to handle deviations from the rational model, to complement RCT's mathematical theorems. The alternative appears to be resigning ourselves to the incentivization and fostering of irrational decision-making across society.
In this article, we consider how motivations for meaning and meaning in life can integrate much of human thought and behavior. We defend the following claims: Humans evolved to be motivated to share meanings with each other. These shared meanings accumulate to form a shared reality which constitute the cultures within which people live. Living in such ecologies of meaning requires that people learn to master these meanings in order to successfully pursue their basic needs. These shared cultural meanings get internalized into networks of meanings that form a key component of people's selves. People depend upon meanings in their lives so much that they are motivated to defend these meanings. People's motivations to defend meanings help them to strive to lead meaningful lives. In sum, we argue that many different aspects of human psychology can be integrated and better understood when they are considered in terms of people's motivations for meaning.
In educational systems where high-stakes assessment, standardized testing, normative grading, and inter-student competition are prevalent, there have been ongoing concerns that too many students are denied educational success experiences such as personal accomplishment, improvement, and progress. In the past decade, there has been increasing interest in growth goals as a means to optimize students' access to these forms of educational success. Growth goals (comprising growth goal setting and growth goal striving) involve students seeking to outperform their past best efforts and performance, encouraging them to consider educational success in terms of personal benchmarks, more than in terms of external benchmarks. Growth goals have typically been operationalized in theory and research by way of personal best goals and self-approach goals. Given the uptick in research into growth goals, this review is a timely opportunity to synthesize definitional, theoretical, and measurement considerations that have underpinned and directed much growth goal research. It examines the environmental (e.g., teachers, classroom climate), personal, and background attributes (e.g., age, gender, SES, at-risk learning status) that are implicated in students' growth goal setting and striving, as well as the impact of growth goals on students' academic outcomes (e.g., engagement, achievement). Evidence from causal modelling and intervention growth goal studies is also reviewed, concluding with suggestions for practice-oriented strategy aimed at supporting students' growth goal efforts, as well as critical issues and directions for growth goals research going forward.
We comprehensively reviewed and organized the literature examining the relationship between future selves and current action. We distinguish studies focused on possible selves, self-gap, and self-continuity, which focus on different aspects of the future self, make distinct predictions and provide conflicting results. We use the dynamic construction, action-readiness, and procedural-readiness components of identity-based motivation (IBM) theory to make sense of these findings. In doing so, we shift focus from what future me is—positive or negative, close or distant, continuous or discontinuous with current me—to what future me does. We make three predictions regarding when people maintain present-focused action and when they switch to future-focused action. People maintain present-focused action if (1) future me is not on the mind or feels irrelevant to current choices or (2) they understand difficulties taking future-focused action as low value or low odds of success. (3) In contrast, they shift to future-focused action if future me feels relevant to current choices and difficulties taking future-focused action seem to imply the value of doing so.
