research

People want to lead healthy, fulfilling lives. Thus, it is unsurprising that myriad policies and public recommendations (e.g., federal dietary guidelines, policies to regulate smoking) aim to promote behaviors that benefit people in the long run. Nevertheless, many struggle with behavioral change and suffer from preventable deaths (e.g., poor diet and tobacco use, Mokdad et al., 2004). To address these issues, my work centers the psychology of how people motivate themselves and others to obtain valued long-term goals. Specifically, I have focused on three questions:

  1. How do people pursue their long-term goals in the face of immediate obstacles?
  2. What mental tools do people have to navigate the challenges during goal pursuit?
  3. How can motivation science be leveraged for motivating and regulating others?

To answer these questions, I adopt a social cognitive approach and leverage advanced methodologies (e.g., high-powered within-subject experiments and repeated-measures designs, mixed-effects modeling, natural language processing, computational modeling). In addition to making theoretical contributions, I aim to provide actionable recommendations for leaders to enhance motivation and performance.

Overcoming Immediate Obstacles

Self-control—the prioritization of global goals over immediate temptations—is critical to successful goal pursuit and is implicated in important real-world outcomes (e.g., health, financial success, positive social relations; Moffitt et al., 2011). Historically, self-control has been studied as an isolated single decision: self-control success defined as preference for the goal-consistent option, such as a dieter choosing an apple over a candy bar (e.g., Berkman et al., 2017; Mischel et al., 1989; Muraven & Baumeister, 2000).

My work challenges this status quo. First, a key challenge of self-control in everyday life is that people face repeated self-control conflicts. Eating a single candy bar does not ruin a diet; it is the repeated pattern of doing so that puts the higher order goal in jeopardy. Second, the treatment of self-control as single-shot decisions treats any deviations from goal consistent options as a failure. When one understands that successful self-control involves repeated decisions over time, it becomes clear that abstinence is not the only option; one could instead pursue moderation—indulging when doing so is harmless or even beneficial to goal pursuit.

Relevant papers

  • Le, P.Q., Scholer, A.A., & Fujita, K. (2024). The role of conflict representation in abstinence and moderation in self-control. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 126(6), 947–977. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspa0000381
  • Fujita, K., Lapka, S.P., & Le, P.Q. (under review) Lay beliefs about willpower and abstinence in self-control. In E. R. Hirt (Ed.), Handbook of Motivation and Social Psychology. Elgar Publishing.
  • Le, P.Q., Fujita K., Lile, J., & Scholer, A.A. (in prep). A trade-off framework of abstinence and moderation in self-control. Theoretical review for Current Directions in Psychological Science. [Proposal accepted]

Modulating Scope to Regulate the Self

Goal pursuit requires people to flexibly modulate their regulatory scope (i.e., the range of concerns and possibilities that one mentally accounts for in goal-directed thoughts and feelings; Trope et al., 2024). For example, to practice self-control, people must consider the broader goals rather than local rewards; at other times, people must be sensitive to immediate demands. I have examined a variety of mental tools that support people’s ability to expand and contract scope.

Relevant papers

  • Le, P.Q., Saltsman, T.L., Seery, M.D., Ward, D., Kondrak, C.L., & Lamarche, V.M. (2019). When a smaller self means manageable obstacles: Spontaneous self-distancing predicts divergent effects of awe during a subsequent performance stressor. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 80, 59-66. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2018.07.010
  • Fujita, K., Le. P.Q., Scholer, A.A., & Miele, D.B. (2024). The metamotivation approach: Insights into the regulation of motivation and beyond. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 18(2), Article e12937. https://doi.org/10.1111/spc3.12937
  • Le, P.Q., Stanczak, O.J., Hildebrand, L.K., Wallace, L.E., Berkman, E.T., & Fujita, K. (under review). A case study for optimizing research paradigms: The within-subjects effect of temporal distance on language abstraction. Preprint: https://osf.io/9uyh8_v1
  • Le, P.Q., Nguyen, T., Scholer, A.A., & Fujita, K. (under review). Beliefs about using construal level to modulate regulatory scope.

Motivating and Regulating Others

I am working on translating behavioral science to real-world interventions. My colleagues and I are piloting an intervention that aims to help farmers align their conservation values with sustainable farming practices (e.g., cover-cropping). I have also helped to develop a novel text-messaging smoking cessation protocol for low SES smokers—a group that is generally non-responsive to most treatments. Results revealed that smokers react more positively to our motivational messages that expand scope (i.e., connect in-the-moment cigarette cravings to broader values and goals) relative to those that prompt emotion reappraisal (i.e., mentally transforming smoking cues to “cool” associated cravings), and prefer to receive the former as a cessation intervention.

Relevant papers

  • Le, P.Q., & Fujita, K. (2025). Matching construal level to regulatory scope in persuasion. In J.D. Teeny, A. Luttrell, and R.E. Petty (Eds.), The Handbook of Personalized Persuasion: Theory and Application. Taylor & Francis, Routledge.
  • Le, P.Q., Libby, L.K., Stewart-Hill, S.A., Ivy, V., & Eibach, R.P. (in prep). Social functions of storyteller’s mental imagery visual perspective.
  • Smith, B.J., Le, P.Q., Nguyen, T., Wilson, S., Cheung, B., Fujita, K., & Berkman, E.T. (in prep). Motivational messages to quit smoking: Comparing high-level construal and downregulation strategies.
  • Dillman-Hasso, N., Wilson, R., Shaffer-Morrison, C.D., Chestnut, G., Le, P.Q., & Fujita, K. (in progress). Using motivation science to promote conservation practices within farmers in Ohio.