Abstract
Recent research on nonconscious activation and pursuit of motivated action has suggested that motives guide subsequent behavior and affective states even when the motivation was induced outside of the actor's awareness. This research has emphasized the effect of automatic processes driven by environmental features, and it is the present author's view that insufficient consideration has been given to the role of intrapersonal processes. The present study investigates the moderation of nonconscious achievement motivation by personal theories of intelligence. Participants in the research were adult students at a technical school. In Study 1, participants primed with achievement motivation did better on a subsequent task than did participants in a control condition. However, affective state after the task varied according to participants' theories of intelligence. Entity theorists reported more negative affect than incremental theorists. In Study 2, the effect of goals matched or mismatched to participants' theories was investigated. Performance facilitation was observed only when the primed goal matched participants' theory of intelligence. These results suggest that theories of intelligence moderate an associative link between achievement motivation and goals.
