On the Motivational Power of Pride: A Field Study With Participants in a Road-Running Event, 2019

Toussaert, Severine (2025). On the Motivational Power of Pride: A Field Study With Participants in a Road-Running Event, 2019. [Data Collection]. Colchester, Essex: UK Data Service. 10.5255/UKDA-SN-857765

Peter is told by his dad that he should forget about applying to top schools given his level. Mary overhears her colleagues saying she does not have what it takes to become a manager. Jim learns that he does not have the favour of the bookmakers in his next professional tennis match. In those three situations, how would Peter, Mary, and Jim react to the adversarial information they received? Would their motivation drop or would they try harder to prove others wrong?

If human beings had no concern for their ego and acted fully rationally, then the three protagonists should react in only one of two ways in the above situations. If the feedback came from an informed party who knows something about their true ability, they should incorporate this feedback in their expectations and become more pessimistic about their chances of success. Alternatively, if the sender of the adversarial information knows nothing about their ability, they should simply discard this information. In either case, the motivation to succeed should not increase and might really drop.

However, evidence from psychology and behavioural economics suggests that people have image concerns: they want to believe in their ability, talent, or skills and they want others to think the same. As a result, they may try harder to prove to others and/or to themselves that they can. It is not difficult to think of examples in which the pride feelings of an individual might push him to go beyond others' (and possibly their own) expectations. Where does this motivational force come from, how is it triggered, and how can we use it to help people perform better? The purpose of this research programme is to shed light on this set of unexplored issues.

Understanding the motivational effect of perceived threats (vs. boosts) to a person's image is important for the design of behaviour change interventions (e.g., interventions that seek to make people lose weight, exercise more, save for retirement, recycle their waste, etc...). Up until recently, interventions designed to make people change their habits focused almost entirely on the use of monetary incentives, with limited long-term effects. While a burgeoning literature has started to investigate the importance of image concerns as a source of motivation, little is known so far about the ways in which this motivational force could be leveraged to design powerful behaviour change interventions.

The goal of this research programme is to make a step in this direction. In a series of three projects conducted in three different environments, I will explore what happens to the motivation of individuals who feel challenged in their ability to complete an ego-relevant task. The first two projects are online experiments in which participants will be randomly assigned to different conditions; in some of these conditions, they will receive a message either from a peer (Project 1) or from the researcher (Project 2) that explicitly questions their ability to succeed in a challenging task. The tasks are (i) staying off Facebook for 28 consecutive days (Project 1) and (ii) meeting a goal in a road-running race (Project 2). In Project 3, I ask whether receiving evidence that challenges one's sense of ego has the same motivational effect in a natural environment i.e., when people are not part of an experiment. In this last project, I study whether students who just fell short of receiving specific honours in a preliminary examination become more motivated to obtain this form of recognition in their final exams.

Of course, not everyone will be more motivated upon receiving ego-threatening information and some people might even get particularly discouraged. I will study empirically how different categories of people react to perceived challenges and assess the emotional impact of those challenges. Finally, I will develop a theoretical framework to articulate the mechanisms that could drive motivation in these types of situations.

Data description (abstract)

The data made available corresponds to Project 2 advertised in the grant, where participants in a road-running event were challenged by the experimenter in their ability to meet their goal for the race. This is the formatted dataset, which brings together survey responses from two different questionnaires together with race results, for several road-running races.

The aim is to explore how perceived threats to self-image impact effort and performance in a real-world setting.

Data creators: