It was expected that aspects of personality, goalorientation,
mindset (implicit self-theory), and positive self-regard (core self-evaluations)
would predict motivation and performance. One hundred twenty-two college students
from San Francisco State University were surveyed to test these hypotheses in an on-line
correlational study. The individual differences were generally found to significantly
correlate with autonomous motivation. The Big 5 personality traits had particularly strong
relationships with the four autonomous motivations. Though mindset was mainly
significantly related to intrinsic motivation to know, the learning goal-orientation was
significantly related to all of the autonomous motivations. A-motivation resulted in being
surprisingly relevant to all of the individual differences as well as to performance. The
patterns of results in this study suggest individual differences significantly predict what
types of motivations engage people in their commitments. The magnitude of these
correlations between individual differences and types of motivation is greatly influenced
by the motivation’s level of self-determination.