Only “genuine” mastery goals lead to academic performance through effort and interest

For many years researchers in social and educational psychology have struggled with an intriguing effect: The desire to learn (i.e., mastery-approach goals), although logically related to learning, does not consistently predict students’ academic performance. A stream of research has proposed an explanation to this mystery by showing that mastery-approach goals are highly socially desirable at University and that some students could use their mastery-approach goal endorsement as a self-presentation strategy: The higher the students’ knowledge of these goals’ social desirability, the lower the relationship between mastery-approach goals and academic performance. This effect has been consistently replicated, but so far the processes governing its manifestation remained uncovered. Across three studies (Ns = 99, 94, and 130), this research examined whether the predictive power of mastery-approach goals on academic performance depends on their underlying motivation (“genuine” vs. strategic self-presentational). Using self-report, experimental manipulation, and behavioral tracking, it showed that mastery-approach goals predicted performance only when they were not perceived as socially desirable. This effect was mediated by behavioral effort (Study 2) and topic-related interest (Study 3). These findings suggest that “genuine” mastery-approach goals are linked to academic performance, providing new insights into the motivational quality of goal pursuit.