Abstract
Effective methods of inducing and maintaining behavior change include the presence of a social environment, game scenarios, and proper goal setting. This study looked at competition versus cooperation as both a social scenario and a game scenario. Past studies have found that competition increases intensity of a task while cooperation increases the motivation to continue a task. Studies have also found that a difficult but obtainable goal level is best to increase motivation to continue. As intensity and desire to continue a task are both important when looking at behavior change, this study aimed to explore if both could be raised simultaneously. After a practice run to get base scores, participants were asked to play a memory based computer game created for the purpose of this study either competitively or cooperatively. The other person they were playing with was fictitious and the scores of this person were calculated based on the participant’s scores. They were only able to see the scores that their partner was able to achieve. The score that participants need in order to either beat their partner or to achieve a cooperative goal was set either at a high or medium level relative to their base score. Those in the cooperative condition showed a higher motivation level overall but there was no difference between goal levels within this condition. There was a difference in goal level for the competitive condition with a high goal leading to more motivation. There were no significant differences in intensity levels between the groups. Implications for self-change research are discussed.