Subliminal priming of motivational orientation in educational settings: Effect on academic performance moderated by mindfulness

Abstract

Recent literature indicates that a motivational orientation can be unconsciously primed. This study examined whether motivational priming influences students’ academic performance within an educational setting and whether this effect is moderated by students’ degree of mindfulness. Two randomly assigned groups of students received an identical lesson. However, the teacher’s slideshow contained different subliminal words according to the condition (autonomous vs. controlled motivation). Results demonstrated an interaction between students’ dispositional mindfulness and priming conditions. The more mindful students were immune to the manipulation whereas the less mindful students were affected by the priming: those primed with autonomous motivation obtained better results than those primed with controlled motivation. These findings contribute to priming research specifying individual differences of priming responsiveness.

Introduction

Research devoted to automaticity and non-conscious processes has exploded over the last years. Evidence from this body of literature indicates that people tend to assimilate the content of environmental stimuli they perceive in an automatic fashion (Bargh, 2006). More precisely, cognitive representations could be temporarily activated – a procedure known as priming – outside of awareness, to influence subsequent perception and behavior in prime consistent directions. Priming has been successfully used to activate traits, attitudes, and stereotypes (see Hassin, Uleman, & Bargh, 2005, for a review). Even motivational processes, which were long thought to be deliberative and conscious (see Weiner, 1992) have been shown to be triggered by priming (see Ferguson, Hassin, & Bargh, 2007).

Nevertheless, research on automaticity of motivational processes has focused mainly on concrete goals and less on general’s motivations. For this purpose, recent studies (Lévesque and Pelletier, 2003, Hodgins et al., 2006) have investigated whether the two broad motivational orientations postulated by Self-Determination Theory (SDT; e.g., Deci & Ryan, 2008) – namely, autonomous and controlled motivation – could also be triggered automatically. Individuals are said to be autonomously motivated when they experience their behaviors as freely chosen, emanating from their true selves. In contrast, a controlled motivation is evidenced in those who engage in their behaviors for external or internal pressure. Past research in the educational setting (see Reeve, 2002, for a review) has shown that an autonomous motivation results in better academic performance while a controlled motivation results in negative outcomes for students.

In the Levesque and Pelletier’s (2003) study, participants were primed using a supraliminal technique (i.e., individuals consciously perceived the primes but were not aware of their effect) which consisted of constructing sentences from sets of scrambled words that were related to either an autonomous (e.g., interested) or a controlled (e.g., constrained) motivation. Participants then solved crossword puzzles in an ostensibly unrelated task. Although participants were unaware of the manipulation, results revealed that those primed with an autonomous motivation displayed higher levels of intrinsic motivation, interest/enjoyment, perceived choice, and performed better than those primed with a controlled motivation. Using the same supraliminal procedure of priming, the Hodgins et al. (2006) studies examined whether primed motivational orientations (i.e., autonomous vs. controlled) were related to the use of different defensive behaviors (i.e., intention to avoid some aspect of reality). Their results showed that participants primed with an autonomous motivation reported lower desire for escape, lower self-serving bias, and less self-handicapping than participants primed with a controlled motivation. Together, results of these studies indicate that motivational primes are generally assimilated and result in differential outcomes measured in the laboratory.

To date, no studies have investigated the impact of motivational primes in a natural setting, such as the classroom. Unlike lab settings where stimuli and environmental condition are highly constrained and controlled, educational arena presents many other stimuli that could interfere with the manipulated prime and undermine its effect. Therefore, an important and pending question of priming research is to know whether the priming effect is strong enough to influence individuals in their daily life (Bargh, 2006). Hence, the first aim of this study is to investigate the differential impact of motivational primes on performance in a real-life setting: the classroom.

Another important perspective of the priming research is to examine individual differences in priming responsiveness (Bargh, 2006). In this respect, individual differences in mindfulness (Langer, 1989) could be interesting to investigate. According to Langer’s view, “mindless” individuals would pay little conscious attention to the present context. Therefore, their current behavior would be largely determined by unconscious processes; blindly following routines or impulses, often acting like automatons. In contrast, “mindful” individuals should turn away from automatic guidance and rely more on deliberate processes. They would carefully evaluate the context in order to determine appropriate ways of behaving in this context.

Mindfulness is thus assumed to be particularly relevant to disrupting automatic influences (Brown and Ryan, 2003, Langer, 1989). Recently, Lévesque and Brown (2007) demonstrated that mindfulness moderated the effect of implicit motivation on motivation for day-to-day behaviors. Specifically, their findings indicated that implicit autonomy orientation assessed with an implicit measure predicted day-to-day motivation for various activities only for those lower in dispositional mindfulness. Contrary to primed motivation, implicit motivations are chronic (i.e., the mental representation is always highly accessible) and their unconscious nature is less certain (e.g., Fazio & Olson, 2003). Hence, the second aim of our study is to extend these findings by examining whether students’ dispositional mindfulness would moderate the unconscious effect of a temporarily activated motivation using subliminal priming.

To examine our objectives, we randomly divided students to attend one of two regular classes. Different subliminal words were imbedded in the instructors’ slideshow depending on the experimental condition. One group of students was exposed to words reflecting autonomous motivation whereas the other was exposed to words reflecting controlled motivation. With exception to the experimental condition, both classes were as identical as possible.

We hypothesized that students primed with an autonomous motivation during the lesson would be more interested and more attentive, and in turn would evidence greater performance on a quiz related to the content of this lesson than students primed with a controlled motivation. We also anticipated that mindfulness would moderate the priming effects on performance such that more mindful students would be less influenced by the primes compared to less mindful students.