Unveiling the Performance-Oriented Brains: Striving to Prove Versus Striving to Outperform

Whether ability goals and normative goals represent qualitatively distinct performance-approach motivation remains debated. The two goals are not easily differentiated by surveys due to potential response biases. To address this problem, we employed an f MRI paradigm to explore the neurocognitive processes underlying these goals. Fifty-seven healthy participants performed challenging working memory tasks in the scanner, with the goal of either validating their excellent ability to an expert (ability goals, n  = 28) or outperforming a competitor (normative goals, n  = 29). In success-prone contexts, both goals engaged similar reward-related neural processes. However, in failure-prone contexts, no overlapping activation was observed. Under these taxing conditions, ability goals elicited heightened activation in the brain region associated with threat detection during feedback. This neural activity was further linked to increased activation in the self-referential brain region during a subsequent non-evaluative task, via inflated self-worth ratings. These findings suggest that the perception of ego threat and the compensatory effort to restore threatened self-image under challenging contexts is a psychological mechanism uniquely associated with ability goals.