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Cycles of Motivation Research

Judith Mary Harackiewicz is the Paul Pintrich Professor of Psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in Madison, Wisconsin. She is a social-personality psychologist who conducts research concerning (1) achievement motivation, (2) interest and intrinsic motivation, (3) motivational interventions, and (4) interventions to close achievement gaps in college STEM courses.

Early Life and Educational Background

Harackiewicz was born on September 21, 1954 in Washington D.C. She grew up in Wellesley, Massachusetts and then earned her BA in Psychology at Cornell University in 1975, where courses in social psychology with Dennis Regan, personality psychology with Henry Alker, and most important, a course in human motivation with Wade Boykin (followed by research experience in his lab) helped crystallize her interest in motivation, studied from a social-personality perspective. She also had the opportunity to babysit for Carl Sagan (the astronomer) and his wife, and she benefited from stimulating, interdisciplinary conversations with a brilliant scholar. She earned her PhD in Personality at Harvard University in 1980 under the direction of John F. Kihlstrom, who was extraordinarily generous with his time, support, and guidance. She also worked with David Kenny and Charles Judd, who provided superb experimental and statistical training. At Harvard, she pursued an independent line of research on intrinsic motivation in a supportive department with outstanding mentors.

In 1976, she married Clifford Thurber, who earned a BA at Cornell in 1975 and a PhD in Geophysics at MIT in 1981, and is now a Professor of Geophysics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. They have two daughters, Mary Irene Thurber, who earned a BA from Stanford University in 2010 and a DVM from the University of Wisconsin-Madison (now a zoo veterinarian), and Katherine Ann Thurber, who earned a BA from Harvard University in 2011 and a PhD in Epidemiology from the Australian National University in 2016.

Professional Career

Harackiewicz was an assistant and associate professor at Columbia University from 1980 through 1989. Since 1989, she has been a professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and since 2015, the Paul Pintrich Professor of Psychology. She is a former editor of major journals in social and personality psychology, and her work has been published in top-tier journals. She has authored more than 100 publications in her career, which have appeared in outlets such as Science, Psychological Science, Psychological Bulletin, American Psychologist, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, and Journal of Educational Psychology. She was an associate editor at Personality and Social Psychology (1991–1994) and at Journal of Experimental Social Psychology (1999–2003). She served as the Editor of Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin from 2005–2009. She was a member of many grant review panels at National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, National Academy of Education, and the Institute for Educational Sciences. Her research has been funded by grants from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, which allowed her to conduct theory-based intervention research in educational contexts.

She received the Chancellor’s Award for Distinguished Teaching at UW-Madison in 2002, as well as the Alliant Energy Underkofler Excellence in Teaching Award for the University of Wisconsin System in 2012. She received a Spencer Fellowship from the National Academy of Education in 1986, and in 2013, she received the Cialdini award from the Society of Personality and Social Psychology.

She is an elected fellow of the American Educational Research Association, the American Psychological Association, the Association for Psychological Science, and the Society for Personality and Social Psychology.

Harackiewicz has mentored many graduate students, including Carol Sansone (Professor, University of Utah), George Manderlink, Kaoru Kurosawa (Professor, Chiba University), Jennifer Epstein, and Steven Abrahams at Columbia University. At the University of Wisconsin-Madison, her PhD students were Andrew Elliot (Professor, University of Rochester), Roberta Deppe, Suzanne Carter, Kenneth Barron (Professor, James Madison University), Amanda Durik (Professor, Northern Illinois University), John Tauer (Professor, University of St. Thomas and Head Basketball Coach), Corwin Senko (Professor, SUNY-New Paltz), Sheree Schrager (Director of Research, Children’s Hospital, Los Angeles), Shawn Bodmann, Chris Hulleman (Professor, University of Virginia), Christopher Rozek (Postdoc, University of Chicago), Elizabeth Canning (Postdoc, University of Indiana). She is currently working with Yoi Tibbetts, Stacy Priniski, and Cameron Hecht. She works closely with her graduate students, and they have been her primary research colleagues over the years.

Research Interests

Harackiewicz has been studying motivation and interest for over 35 years, conducting experimental and longitudinal studies of goals, rewards, competition, and value transmission in academic contexts. She works at the interface of social, personality, and educational psychology. Early in her career, she conducted theory-based experimental studies of rewards, achievement goals, and performance evaluation, with a focus on personality factors that moderated the effects of situational factors on the development of interest and motivation. As the educational relevance of her work become more salient, she began to conduct longitudinal studies of interest development in college courses and academic careers. This work informed further experimental work, and she began a more cyclical approach to research: identifying important motivational phenomena in the field, testing motivational mechanisms in the lab, and designing motivation interventions based on longitudinal and experimental findings.

Her most recent research concerns interventions to promote motivation. She has conducted intervention research in family contexts, high school science classes, and college courses in psychology, chemistry, and biology in both community college and university contexts. She employs randomized control trial methods to test the impact of utility value in motivating students to participate in science in general (in high school), and to perform better in biology and psychology classes, and in their college classes more generally. Her brief utility-value intervention with parents – intended to help them see the importance of math and science for their teen and encourage them to talk to their teen about science – resulted in their teens taking on average, an additional semester of math or science in the last 2 years of high school. This research (Harackiewicz et al. 2012) received the 2013 Cialdini award, from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, “for the publication that best explicates social psychological phenomena through the use of field research methods and thereby demonstrates the relevance of the discipline to communities outside of academic social psychology.”

She is currently testing motivational interventions in college biology courses, working to promote interest and performance in the foundational course that serves as a gateway to biomedical careers. In a recent paper (Harackiewicz et al. 2016a) she reported that a utility-value intervention, embedded in the course curriculum and tested with a double-blind randomized control design, closed achievement gaps in a critical gateway course for underrepresented students, revealing the potential of motivation interventions to address important societal problems.