Topics — What a work is about. Nucleation holds whatever reading the owner files here, whether or not an Anthology of the SOTA topic could also hold it; instruction for ML practice belongs to the anthology (ADR-048). The words are seeded from the clusters the reading-time triage of 2026-09-25 found, and grow by decision.
Motivation — why organisms act and persist — intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, needs, goals and values, the internalization of regulation, and the difference between autonomous and controlled motives; the empirical counterpart of the philosophy of autonomy under agency (ADR-023).
11 of 371 QUESTION documents. Back to the full index.
| # | Title | Summary | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| QUESTION-066 | Does the way a course of action is held, under felt external control or for the agent’s own reasons, set how long it persists once outside support is removed, with the agent’s valuation of the activity held fixed? | Filed in the fourth synthesis pass to give readings no question asked for a place in the argument. It bears on CLAIM-027, CLAIM-122 and CLAIM-089. THEORY-046, THEORY-049, THEORY-154 and THEORY-077 answer it in part; the body gives each one’s limit. | Open |
| QUESTION-077 | Is agreement among an agent’s interests produced by coupling, as when each sees and follows the current majority, a different kind of integration from agreement because their valuations coincide? | Drawn by the assistant from CASE-074 and filed at the owner’s request. A crowd that can see its running vote tally comes to agree by herding, and its members’ preferences need not change. CLAIM-162 defines synchronization as valuations that coincide. The question is whether agreement by coupling is a third route to acting as one, beside agreement by coinciding valuation (flow) and a change in which interest may act (CLAIM-156). | Open |
| QUESTION-131 | How does structural frustration among jointly incompatible demands relate to operative thwarting of a constituent’s demands, and under what conditions can one occur without the other? | Raised in the reviews the owner relayed on 2026-10-18, after the filing of the exchange of 2026-10-17. Structural frustration has a settled formal definition: a collection of demands is structurally frustrated when no outcome attainable under the specified constraints meets them all, S ∉ 𝒦(𝒪; D) (CLAIM-347). What is open is how it relates to operative thwarting, where a particular constituent’s live demand is counteracted by an identifiable constraint or countervailing process. Physics frustration (CLAIM-153) is the structural sense, and self-determination theory’s need thwarting (THEORY-052) the operative one. An answer says when structural incompatibility shows up as thwarting, whether thwarting can occur where joint satisfaction is possible, and what evidence attributes either to a bearer. Merely failing to realize an attainable set of requirements is neither. | Open |
| QUESTION-267 | When the ordering that prevails a system’s negotiation ranks its states by a proxy for its maintenance rather than by its maintenance, as a firm’s potential metric may, is that valence, and is it the form that metric fixation in organizations and addiction in persons share? | TERM-076 restricts valence to an ordering serving as the negotiation’s potential of the system’s own states by their bearing on its maintenance. A potential ordering can instead rank them by a proxy that has come apart from maintenance. Wells Fargo’s cross-sell metric (CASE-151) is a candidate: treated as the firm’s standing, it was not its viability. The question is whether such potential is valence, and whether it is a common form of organizational metric fixation and of addiction. | Open |
| QUESTION-269 | Does the potential account of valence need the will-organization’s other relations, accessibility, jurisdiction, suspension and transformation, beside the priority, persistence and resumption it reads off which side wins, and does a system’s valence change when one of them changes and the record of wins does not? | From the comparison of the record’s will and affect lines of 2026-10-23, filed at the owner’s direction. Will-organization (TERM-023) has six relations, and CLAIM-057 shows three of them vary independently. The potential account (TERM-076, TERM-078) reads valence from wins alone, through Frijda’s three marks. That is the reduction to “who won” that CLAIM-027 resists for will. The question is whether the other relations make a difference to valence that the record of wins cannot see. | Open |
| QUESTION-301 | Is acting for one’s legacy, for how one is remembered or for people who will live after one’s death, self-interest on a self extended in time, as collectivism on the owner’s thesis is self-interest on a self extended across people? | The owner’s angle of 2026-10-29, opened by Johnston’s Surviving Death, whose good person lives on in “the onward rush of humankind”. The owner’s thesis (CLAIM-491) enlarges the self across people; legacy enlarges it across time, past death. Psychology measures the temporal extent the way it measures the social one (overlap circles for the future self), and finds legacy motivation drives concern for future generations. Philosophy offers three readings of that concern: an extended self, interests that outlast death (Pitcher), and dependence on a future we will not see (Scheffler). | Open |
| QUESTION-308 | Do the process effects of implementation intentions, the immediacy, efficiency under load and running without conscious intent of the planned response and the better detection of its cue, survive correction for publication bias or preregistered replication, and do they mediate goal attainment rather than merely accompany it? | The promotion condition formerly on THEORY-913, moved here when the tenth status review narrowed THEORY-913 to what the 2006 meta-analysis’s small, uncorrected pools showed, and promoted it, as THEORY-285’s moved to QUESTION-303. Whether the effects are as large as reported, and whether they carry the effect on goal attainment, is this question. | Open |
| QUESTION-309 | Within one design, do contingent if-then plans outperform schedule plans for the same goal, sample and outcome, does recording the plan weaken it, and does rehearsal work through the accessibility of the cue or the strength of the cue–response link? | The promotion condition formerly on THEORY-908, moved here when the tenth status review narrowed THEORY-908 to the between-test differences the 2024 meta-analysis measured, and promoted it, as THEORY-285’s moved to QUESTION-303. Whether format, rehearsal and recording cause those differences is this question. | Open |
| QUESTION-310 | Does the effect of forming implementation intentions stay reliably above zero, and of the same small order, once tests published after September 2019 are added or preregistered multi-site replications are run with correction for publication bias, and does it hold outside the lab and online? | The promotion condition formerly on THEORY-918, moved here when the tenth status review narrowed THEORY-918 to what the 2024 meta-analysis measured to September 2019, and promoted it, as THEORY-285’s moved to QUESTION-303. Whether the corrected effect holds in later and registered evidence is this question. | Open |
| QUESTION-314 | Is the response an implementation intention specifies gated by the goal intention it serves, so that with the goal deactivated or weak the cue alone does not produce it, and does the gate survive the plan’s being acted on many times? | The promotion condition formerly on THEORY-904, moved here when the tenth status review narrowed THEORY-904 to what Gollwitzer and Sheeran concluded and what the 2024 moderator measured, and promoted it, as THEORY-285’s moved to QUESTION-303. The authors conclude the gate from a handful of studies; whether a crossed test shows it, and whether it survives repetition, is this question. | Open |
| QUESTION-369 | What would show that an experience is a basic psychological need, something an organism’s functioning requires, rather than something that reliably raises reported well-being, when self-determination theory identifies needs by their effects on well-being and treats well-being as the presence of need satisfaction? | A3’s closing question in the exchange “Assess SDT Coverage” (2026-11-02), at the owner’s U3 (“how about the basic psychological needs stuff?”): “What evidence would establish that a psychological experience is a need … rather than simply something that reliably makes humans feel better?” It is the second time the record meets it. The first is NOTE-439’s “Interdefinition” limitation, which says “need” and “well-being” are “partly interdefined” in Deci and Ryan 2000, and the paper “does not show how to test a need claim without assuming the well-being measure”. A3 did not know the record had raised it. | Open |