Abstract
Prior research suggests praise increases motivation. The present research tested pride and humility as mediators of the effect of praise on motivation. I hypothesized that pride may contribute to motivation because it is pleasant to experience and boosts perceived competence. Humility may contribute to motivation by facilitating less inflated self-assessment and greater awareness of one's room for improvement. In Studies 1a and 1b, participants recalled experiences of receiving praise or non-praise experiences and reported how proud, humble, and motivated they had felt. Participants recalled feeling more proud, humble, and motivated after praise than after non-praise experiences. Both pride and humility mediated the effect of praise on motivation. Study 2 was conducted to develop better ways of assessing humility for use in Study 3. In Study 2, participants watched a video intended to induce humility or a neutral video. Participants who watched the humility induction video compared to participants who watched the neutral video self-reported greater humility and made less inflated self-evaluations. Narcissism correlated negatively with self-reported humility and correlated positively with inflation of self-evaluations. In Study 3, participants received praise versus no feedback from a friend and an expert on an essay they had written. Participants provided self-report measures of pride, humility, and motivation, as well as behavioral measures of effort/motivation. Results were consistent with hypotheses that praise increases pride, humility, and motivation. Study 3 produced no evidence of simple mediation. However, humility showed a marginal pattern of interactional mediation, such that, after receiving praise humility was associated with greater motivation, but after receiving no feedback humility was associated with less motivation. Differences in the praise situation, including the meaningfulness and unexpectedness of the praise, may have produced the divergent findings across studies. Study 3 yielded suggestive evidence that praise may be more motivating for people with high than with low self-esteem. Humility was positively associated with gratitude across studies and tended to be negatively associated with inflated self-evaluations in Studies 2 and 3.
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