Inferences from Difficulty: Metacognition and Identity based Motivation

Abstract.  People procrastinate, start too late, invest too little and give up too quickly to attain important self-goals. In the current talk I ask why that might be, focusing on what people infer about the relevance of their future self to their current choices and what people infer from task difficulty. I present experiments from this ongoing line of research that highlight both the malleability of interpretation and the possibility that effects are in part culture- and social identity-bound, in that some cultures and some social identities may reinforce one interpretation over the other. Correlations with related constructs are considered, an integrative process model described, and implications for intervention highlighted.