The Self as a Point of Contact Between Social Psychology and Motivation

Interdisciplinarity is a mixed blessing. An attempted union between two disciplines can cook up a couscous of conflicting assumptions and theories, misaligned methodological and data analytic strategies, and disconcertingly divergent validation philosophies. The chimerical offspring of this union will be amorphous, uncompelling, and unusable. Yet sometimes such a union can turn out to be a marriage made in heaven. The union of social psychology and motivation is a case in point, with the self as master of ceremonies.