research

I am interested in the psychology of how people motivate themselves and others to obtain valued long-term goals. Goal pursuit often requires people to modulate their regulatory scope (i.e., expanding or contracting the range of concerns and possibilities that they account for, Trope et al., 2021). For example, people can transcend beyond the present and consider their global goals to overcome immediate obstacles. In contrast, people may need to contract scope and focus on a task at hand. My research examines the impact of modulating scope on intra- and inter-personal motivational processes. Specifically, I examine three questions:

1. How do people pursue their long-term goals in face of immediate obstacles?
2. In what ways can modulating scope aid self-regulation and goal pursuit?
3. What are the implications 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

People often face immediate, local indulgences or distractions that conflict with long-term, global goals. Thus, prioritizing goals—or, practicing self-control—is important. Traditional self-control research examines the various tactics that people use to overcome specific temptations in isolated decisions (e.g., Milyavskaya et al., 2021). These studies tag indulgences as self-control failures, and thus generally define self-control success in terms of abstinence (i.e., a pattern of choices in which one never indulges). Although indulgences can create setbacks for goals at the decision level, some research suggests that occasional and intentional indulgences can sustain and support one’s motivation to persist with goal pursuit at a higher strategic level (Jia et al., 2019). Given the prospect of multiple self-control decisions over the course of goal pursuit, my colleagues and I propose that people have strategic level preferences: they may prefer moderation (i.e., a pattern of choices in which one indulges when doing so does not harm one’s goals or may even help promote the pursuit of those goals) versus abstinence. As such, we asked when and why people may prefer one strategy over the other, and showed, for the first time, that people have systematic strategy preferences and that how they represent the self-control conflict plays a key role in determining those preferences (Le, Scholer, & Fujita, in press).

My ongoing work examines the tradeoffs of abstinence and moderation, and the implications of these strategies on how people and researchers understand self-control. Further, I am investigating how the factors that impact people’s personal strategy preferences and may likewise impact how they believe others should be regulated (i.e., via abstinence versus harm reduction public policies).

Modulating Scope to Regulate the Self

Successful goal pursuit at times—as in self-control conflicts—requires people to broaden their regulatory scope beyond the concerns of the immediate here-and-now, and to consider their global goals and values. Nevertheless, goal pursuit at other times may require a more contractive perspective. For example, when learning motoric skills, people need to focus on the task at hand and respond to immediate situational demands (e.g., Zimmerman & Kitsantas, 1996).

My research has explored various mental tools with which people respectively broaden versus narrow regulatory scope in response to the demands of goal pursuit, including high- versus low-level construal (i.e., abstract, decontextualized mental representations vs. concrete representations that focus on idiosyncratic details; Trope et al., 2021; Desai, Le, et al., under review; Le, Hildebrand, et al., invited resubmission); self-distancing versus self-immersion (i.e., decentering vs. centering the self when reflecting on emotional experiences, Kross & Ayduk, 2011; Le et al., 2019); and, third-person versus first-person visual perspective (Libby & Eibach, 2011; Le, Libby, Morewedge, et al., in prep). As such, I seek to document the variety of tools that people can use to sustain and support their goal pursuit.

Motivating and Regulating Others

Given the usefulness of modulating scope for self-regulation, I am interested in extending these insights to intervene and help people achieve valued goals. To do so, it is important to examine whether people understand when to expand or contract regulatory scope, and the mental tools that they need to do so——in other words, their metamotivational knowledge (i.e., lay beliefs about when and how to regulate motivation; Fujita, Le, et al., 2024; Le, Nguyen, et al., in prep).

Additionally, I am working on translating behavioral science to interventions. In an ongoing FFAR-funded project, my colleagues and I are piloting an intervention that aims to help Midwestern farmers align their conservation values with daily farming practices (e.g., cover-cropping) by encouraging them to expand their scope at key decision points (Shaffer-Morrison, Wilson, Dillman-Hasso, Le, & Fujita, in progress). In a different intervention, my colleagues and I are investigating the extent to which expanding scope may motivate low socio-economic smokers to quit smoking (Smith, Le, et al., in prep).

People must not only motivate themselves, but also motivate others and may do the latter by sharing personal life stories, such as stories of social injustice. Although the visual perspective literature traditionally only examines intrapersonal processes, I propose that recalling a personal event from a third-person (vs. first-person) visual perspective may lead people to emphasize the event’s broader meaning (vs. their experience during the event). This, in turn, may modulate the audience’s scope, directing their motivations to respond to that broader meaning. Indeed, when Black participants pictured discrimination from the third-person (vs. first-person) perspective, they told stories that were more effective in motivating readers to support racial justice (Le, Libby, Stewart-Hill et al., in progress). This work provides evidence that recalling events from a third-person perspective could be a tool for expanding others’ scope. Through this research, I aim to not only understand how marginalized individuals tell impactful stories for social justice, but also to identify communication techniques that may help audiences connect individual stories of injustice to broader patterns in society and feel motivated for change.