Why is it that asking the question is more motivating than declaring the answer? Why is it more motivating to question whether we will do something, as opposed to telling ourselves to do something? Why does asking yourself a question about your potential behaviour increase the likelihood of that behaviour?
In a study that addressed these questions, University of Illinois Professor Dolores Albarracin and Visiting Assistant Professor Ibrahim Senay, along with Kenji Noguchi, Assistant Professor at Southern Mississippi University,found that those who ask themselves whether they will perform a task generally do better than those who tell themselves that they will.
When a group of students were given one or the other of these contemplative tasks before facing an anagrams exercise, the ones who had asked themselves whether they would do it completed more anagrams than the group who were just thinking about doing it.
In another experiment, just writing ‘Will I’ rather than ‘I will’ several times before the task meant that students were likely to commit themselves to more time exercising during the coming week. Interestingly, just writing the word ‘will’ was not enough — it had to be the question form.
Why does this happen? Professor Albarracin’s team suspected that it was related to an unconscious formation of the question “Will I” and its effects on motivation. By asking themselves a question, people were more likely to open their curiosity and build their own motivation. They argue that asking yourself questions rather than making declarative statements is more likely to lead to intrinsic (or internal) motivation because you have a greater feeling of autonomy. You are able to choose and, if you have chosen to do this, it must be more important to you.
“The popular idea is that self-affirmations enhance people’s ability to meet their goals,” Professor Albarracin said. “It seems, however, that when it comes to performing a specific behaviour, asking questions is a more promising way of achieving your objectives.”
Perhaps, “Bob the Builder” has the right idea when he asks, “Can we fix it?”
Reference
Senay, I., Albarracin, D., & Noguchi, K. (2010). Motivating goal-directed behavior through introspective self-talk: The role of the interrogative form of simple future tense. Psychological Science, 21, 499-504.
