Didier Cuche and Deviation from Goals as Motivation

By Aaron Reid
February 20, 2010

Imagine you’re at the top of the men’s Super G at the 2010 Olympics. You are the reigning Downhill season champion and three days earlier you were favored to win the Downhill, you finished in a disappointing 6th place. You’re 35 years old.  Twelve years ago you took the Silver at the Nagano Olympics in Japan in 1998. This is likely your last best chance to win an Olympic gold medal. You are Didier Cuche.
The iconic downhill call voice of announcer Tim Ryan from NBC recounts your history, dating back to that near miss of gold in Nagano, and your travails ever since as Olympic gold has evaded your grasp, and as you launch out of the gate he states what everyone watching already understands:

“You can be sure he has no lack of motivation here.”

If you’re Didier Cuche, surely you want the announcer to leave well enough alone and let you ski your race. If you’re the watching American public, you’re probably hoping that Cuche’s motivation isn’t so great that he is able summon the strength to topple Bode Miller, who is currently sitting atop the podium in first place. And if you’re a psychologist, or a marketer, or anyone remotely interested in understanding the motivational drivers of behavior, you may be thinking of Powers (1973) and control theory to explain how distance from a goal motivates behavior to close the gap and achieve your desired end state.
It is the essential human truth embodied in control theory that makes the NBC announcer’s call ring so true. When you have a highly important goal and you are deviated from that goal, yet it is still within your reach, your motivation to take action to achieve it increases. This principle applies whether we are talking about deviation from achievement based goals such as winning an Olympic gold medal (Uleman & Bargh, 2008), or deviation from basic visceral equilibrium states such as hunger (Lowenstein, 1996), sexual satiation (Ariely & Lowenstein, 2006) or thirst (Strahan, Spencer, and Zanna, 2005).
What I find so interesting about the case of Didier Cuche in the Super G and the NBC announcer’s call, is that there are volumes of research, dating back decades, that debate and provide evidence that deviation from goal states provides motivation for human’s to achieve goals, while we all know that human truth implicitly. When we hear Cuche’s history and see him at the top of the mountain at the precipice of his last best chance to win Olympic gold, we don’t need decades of research to confirm what we already know, “you can be sure he has no lack of motivation here.”
It makes me wonder, what else are we painstakingly researching that humans already implicitly know to be a fundamental truth about human behavior?

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Aaron Reid

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Founder & CEO, Sentient Decision Science, Inc.


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