Constructive and Defensive Motivation
Constructive and Defensive Motivation
by Gerald Jones, Ph.D.
University of Southern California, 1964-2007:
Student, Lecturer, Adjunct Assistant Professor of
Statistics, Staff (Retired)
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I first encountered the constructs of constructive
and defensive motivation in graduate school in
the remarkable Aptitudes and Instructional Methods:
A Handbook for Research on Interactions by Lee J. Cronbach
and Richard Snow, New York: Irvington, 1977 [paperback 1981].
For their explanation of the constructs
see pp.441ff. of the 1981 edition.
I gratefully acknowledge their genius, and I'm
continually seduced into applying this explanatory
dichotomy to just about everything I see and hear.
I'd also like to acknowledge and thank Dr Richard Clark,
my professor in that Motivation course in the early 1980s,
who enthusiastically introduced us to Cronbach and Snow.