Regulatory Mode Questionnaire

Abstract

The Regulatory Mode Questionnaire (RMQ) is a prominent psychometric instrument developed by Arie W. Kruglanski, Erik P. Thompson, E. Tory Higgins, and their colleagues (2000) to assess individual differences in self-regulatory functioning. Rooted in Regulatory Mode Theory, the RMQ operationalizes two fundamental, functionally orthogonal dimensions of goal pursuit: locomotion and assessment. Locomotion captures the self-regulatory inclination toward initiated movement, uninterrupted progress, and dynamic transition from state to state (“just do it”), whereas assessment reflects the comparative, evaluative, and critical scrutiny of past, present, and prospective goals, means, and outcomes (“do the right thing”). The standard instrument consists of 30 self-report items evaluated on a 6-point Likert scale ranging from 1 (“strongly disagree”) to 6 (“strongly agree”). The scale is composed of two primary substantive subscales of 12 items each—the Locomotion Scale and the Assessment Scale—supplemented by a 6-item Lie (infrequency/social desirability) scale designed to screen for dissimulation and response bias. Across extensive international psychometric evaluations, the RMQ demonstrates robust internal consistency, with Cronbach’s alpha coefficients typically ranging from .78 to .86 for both primary dimensions, alongside substantial test-retest reliability over multi-month intervals. Confirmatory factor analyses consistently substantiate the two-factor orthogonal structural model across diverse cultural, organizational, and clinical cohorts. The instrument exhibits strong convergent, discriminant, and predictive validity, systematically forecasting variations in decision-making velocity versus precision, affective well-being, counterfactual thinking, workplace productivity, leadership style, and procrastination. Consequently, the RMQ serves as an indispensable assessment tool within social psychology, personality research, organizational behavior, and behavioral economics.

Keywords

Regulatory Mode Questionnaire, RMQ, Locomotion, Assessment, Self-Regulation, Goal Pursuit, Kruglanski, Higgins, Action Orientation, Decision Making, Psychometrics, Scale Validation, Comparative Evaluation, Goal Attainment

Authors

The Regulatory Mode Questionnaire was constructed and psychometrically validated by an international consortium of social and personality psychologists led by:

• Arie W. Kruglanski, Ph.D. – Distinguished University Professor of Psychology at the University of Maryland, College Park. Kruglanski is renowned for his seminal contributions to human motivation, cognitive closure, and goal-directed action.
• Erik P. Thompson, Ph.D. – Researcher in social cognition and motivational processes, formerly affiliated with the University of Maryland and Columbia University.
• E. Tory Higgins, Ph.D. – Stanley Schachter Professor of Psychology, Professor of Business, and Director of the Motivation Science Center at Columbia University. Higgins is internationally recognized for formulating Regulatory Focus Theory, Self-Discrepancy Theory, and Regulatory Mode Theory.
• M. Nadir Atash, Ph.D. – Quantitative psychologist and methodological researcher specializing in social cognition measurement models.
• Antonio Pierro, Ph.D. – Full Professor of Social Psychology at the Sapienza University of Rome, Italy, who has published extensively on cross-cultural adaptations and organizational manifestations of regulatory modes.
• James Y. Shah, Ph.D. – Associate Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Duke University, investigating goal pursuit, self-regulation, and motivational systems.
• Scott Spiegel, Ph.D. – Experimental psychologist and researcher focusing on affective science and self-regulatory mechanisms at Columbia University.

Purpose

The primary purpose of the Regulatory Mode Questionnaire is to quantify stable individual differences in the two core psychological dimensions that govern how individuals initiate, sustain, evaluate, and complete goal-directed activities. Whereas traditional motivational models primarily investigate what goals people select or why they choose them (e.g., intrinsic versus extrinsic motivations, promotion versus prevention orientations), Regulatory Mode Theory investigates how individuals mentally and behaviorally execute goal pursuit. The scale was devised to fill an essential empirical void: delineating the psychological engine that drives continuous forward momentum (locomotion) from the psychological apparatus that establishes quality control, comparative valuation, and critical appraisal (assessment).

In applied and empirical contexts, the RMQ resolves critical distinctions across multiple psychological domains:

• Decision-Making Science: The RMQ clarifies why certain decision-makers suffer from decision paralysis, counterfactual rumination, and post-decisional regret (hallmarks of high assessment), whereas others make swift choices, display minimal buyer’s remorse, but risk committing avoidable heuristic errors due to excessive speed (hallmarks of high locomotion).
• Industrial and Organizational Psychology: Human resource professionals and organizational researchers utilize the RMQ to assess person-job fit, team composition, and leadership efficacy. Locomotors thrive in fast-paced, execution-heavy environments requiring dynamic agility, while assessors excel in strategic planning, quality assurance, auditing, risk analysis, and systematic optimization.
• Academic and Educational Counseling: The instrument identifies the root causes of distinct academic pathologies. High assessment coupled with low locomotion often manifests as severe academic procrastination, perfectionistic paralysis, and evaluation anxiety. Conversely, interventions can be tailored to bolster locomotive momentum to translate critical appraisals into actual study habits.
• Clinical and Well-Being Research: Mental health researchers deploy the RMQ to understand how regulatory modes intersect with affective disorders. Assessment orientation is frequently associated with depression, neuroticism, self-critical rumination, and negative affect when discrepancies between real and ideal states are salient. Locomotion operates as a psychological buffer, facilitating resilient coping through active engagement and psychological flow.

Psychological Construct

The psychological constructs operationalized by the Regulatory Mode Questionnaire originate in Kruglanski and Higgins’s functional conceptualization of human self-regulation. The authors theorized that any comprehensive self-regulatory episode requires both the psychological capacity to evaluate alternatives to determine the optimal course of action and the behavioral capacity to move relentlessly toward the desired end-state. Crucially, these two functions operate on independent psychological vectors, giving rise to distinct behavioral phenotypes.

1. The Locomotion Dimension

Locomotion is defined as the self-regulatory aspect concerned with initiating and maintaining continuous movement away from a current state toward an alternate state. For an individual high in locomotion, psychological value is derived directly from movement, activity, and kinetic progress rather than the static properties of the goal itself. The locomotive motto is quintessentialized as “just do it.” Individuals characterized by predominant locomotion display the following behavioral and cognitive hallmarks:

• Preference for Action: A pervasive distaste for waiting, passivity, delay, or contemplation once an intent is formed (e.g., Item 16: “When I decide to do something, I can’t wait to get started”).
• Rapid Task Transition: Immediate psychological pivoting toward subsequent goals upon concluding an existing project, often preempting celebrations of accomplishment (e.g., Item 21: “By the time I accomplish a task, I already have the next one in mind”).
• Task Engagement and Persistence: High energetic investment and flow in current endeavors, with minimal distraction from counterfactual options (e.g., Item 8: “I am a ‘doer’”; Item 28: “When I get started on something, I usually persevere until I finish”).
• Intolerance of Stagnation: Frustration with idle leisure or unnecessary administrative deliberation that impedes forward momentum.

2. The Assessment Dimension

Assessment constitutes the comparative and evaluative component of self-regulation. It entails continuous psychological monitoring, appraisal, and systemic comparison of current states against alternative possibilities, benchmarks, or societal ideals. The primary imperative of the assessor is “to do the right thing.” Assessors are relentlessly concerned with accuracy, critical evaluation, and establishing the relative superiority of entities. Key facets include:

• Comparative Scrutiny: Constant social and self-referential comparisons to ascertain comparative standing and excellence (e.g., Item 9: “I often compare myself with other people”; Item 30: “When I meet a new person I usually evaluate how well he or she is doing on various dimensions…”).
• Critical and Analytical Orientation: Thorough dissection of personal plans, performance metrics, and interpersonal interactions (e.g., Item 6: “I spend a great deal of time taking inventory of my positive and negative characteristics”; Item 11: “I often critique work done by myself and others”).
• Post-Decisional Rumination: High susceptibility to regret, backward-looking evaluation, and retrospective analysis of conversation and choices (e.g., Item 27 reverse-coded: “I rarely analyze the conversations I have had with others after they occur”).
• Quality Maximization: A deep unwillingness to accept “good enough” (satisficing), favoring exhaustive information searches and optimization.

3. Orthogonality and Joint Modes

Because locomotion and assessment are theoretically orthogonal, an individual may score high on both, low on both, or high on one and low on the other. Kruglanski et al. (2000) demonstrated that individuals possessing high levels of both modes achieve optimal self-regulatory effectiveness: assessment determines the highest-value objective, while locomotion drives efficient execution without excessive cognitive rumination.

4. The Lie Subscale

The 6-item Lie scale embedded within the RMQ functions as an infrequency and social desirability detection mechanism. Derived from classical psychometric lie constructs (e.g., the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire), it presents absolutist, socially idealized claims that virtually no honest respondent can genuinely endorse (e.g., Item 14: “I have never been late for work or for an appointment”; Item 23: “I have never hurt another person’s feelings”). High scores alert researchers to unreflective acquiescence or deliberate impression management.

Theoretical Framework

The conceptual genesis of the Regulatory Mode Questionnaire is rooted in Regulatory Mode Theory (RMT), formulated as a crucial evolutionary development beyond classical motivational models. During the 1980s and 1990s, self-regulation was heavily dominated by cybernetic models (e.g., Carver & Scheier’s control-theory feedback loops) and Higgins’s own Regulatory Focus Theory (RFT).

In cybernetic control theory, self-regulation proceeds via a Test-Operate-Test-Exit (TOTE) cycle. Kruglanski et al. recognized that previous research had conflated the two intrinsic operations within this mechanism: the Test phase (the comparative evaluation of a current state against a reference value) and the Operate phase (the enactment of behavioral changes to alter distance from the reference value). Regulatory Mode Theory directly maps onto these cybernetic components: assessment constitutes the psychological embodiment of the Test mechanism, whereas locomotion constitutes the functional embodiment of the Operate mechanism.

Furthermore, RMT distinctively complements Regulatory Focus Theory. RFT delineates the motivational orientation toward desired end-states—distinguishing between a Promotion focus (aspirations, ideals, growth, sensitivity to positive outcomes) and a Prevention focus (obligations, security, safety, sensitivity to negative outcomes). In contrast, Regulatory Mode Theory deals not with the strategic nature of the goal, but with the process of locomotion and assessment utilized during goal pursuit. Thus, an individual in a promotion focus can pursue their aspirations either through rapid locomotive execution or careful assessment; similarly, a prevention-focused individual can prevent hazards by quickly moving away from threats (locomotion) or exhaustively evaluating every potential risk (assessment).

RMT also establishes theoretical cross-talk with Julius Kuhl’s Action versus State Orientation model and Peter Gollwitzer’s Mindset Theory of Action Phases. However, while Gollwitzer frames deliberative and implemental mindsets as sequential temporal phases of a single decision episode, RMT treats locomotion and assessment as chronic, continuous, trait-like individual differences that can simultaneously be primed as situational states across diverse contexts.

Validity

The psychometric validity of the Regulatory Mode Questionnaire has been rigorously established across dozens of empirical studies spanning basic laboratory experiments, large-scale cross-cultural field surveys, and neurological studies.

1. Construct and Factorial Validity

In the foundational validation studies by Kruglanski et al. (2000), exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses supported the independence of the Locomotion and Assessment dimensions. Across independent samples totaling over 3,000 participants, the correlation between the two substantive factors consistently hovered near zero (r values typically ranging between -.05 and .12, non-significant), robustly confirming that the two constructs are orthogonal rather than bipolar opposites.

2. Convergent and Discriminant Validity

The RMQ exhibits clear convergent and discriminant boundaries when examined against the Five-Factor Model of Personality, Kuhl’s Action-State Orientation scale, and Higgins’s Regulatory Focus Questionnaire (RFQ):

• Locomotion: Correlates moderately and positively with Extraversion (r ≈ .30 to .40), Conscientiousness (r ≈ .35 to .45), and Action Orientation. It demonstrates negligible or slightly negative correlations with Neuroticism. Locomotion shares modest positive correlations with Promotion focus but remains distinct as an operational rather than value-driven construct.
• Assessment: Demonstrates a substantial positive correlation with Neuroticism (r ≈ .35 to .50) and negative correlations with self-esteem and generalized self-efficacy when evaluated in isolation. It correlates moderately with need for cognitive closure (specifically the need for accuracy) and State Orientation (rumination). Importantly, assessment correlates only weakly or moderately with Prevention focus, demonstrating clear discriminant divergence.

3. Criterion and Predictive Validity

Empirical investigations have validated the scale’s predictive power across diverse behavioral criteria:

• Decision Speed vs. Quality Maximization: In multi-attribute consumer choice paradigms, high assessors inspect more alternatives, take significantly longer to reach conclusions, and experience elevated post-decisional regret and counterfactual thoughts (“what if I had chosen otherwise?”). High locomotors process fewer choices, decide rapidly, and report high immediate post-choice satisfaction (Pierro et al., 2008).
• Academic Procrastination: Pierro, Giacomantonio, Pica, Kruglanski, and Higgins (2011) showed that academic procrastination is negatively predicted by locomotion and positively predicted by assessment. When locomotive tendencies are dominant, the latency between intention and task initiation drops markedly.
• Well-Being and Affect: High locomotion strongly predicts subjective vitality, positive affect, and high life satisfaction. In contrast, assessment correlates with depression symptoms, negative affect, and chronic self-discrepancy monitoring unless paired with strong locomotive abilities to mitigate inaction.

Reliability

The Regulatory Mode Questionnaire displays robust classical psychometric reliability characteristics across heterogeneous samples, including university students, military personnel, corporate managers, and clinical cohorts across North America, Europe, and Asia.

1. Internal Consistency

In the seminal publication by Kruglanski et al. (2000), internal consistency estimates evaluated via Cronbach’s alpha yielded values of:

• Locomotion Scale: α = .80 (ranging between .78 and .85 across five primary experimental samples).
• Assessment Scale: α = .79 (ranging between .76 and .83 across validation samples).

Subsequent psychometric investigations evaluating translated adaptations—such as the Italian validation by Pierro et al. (2006), the Japanese adaptation by Komiya et al. (2014), and Chinese cohorts—have consistently reported Cronbach’s alpha values exceeding the widely accepted .75 threshold (typically .79 to .86 for Locomotion and .78 to .84 for Assessment). McDonald’s omega (ω) coefficients computed in contemporary structural equation modeling studies mirror these indices, confirming high composite reliability.

2. Test-Retest Reliability

Temporal stability assessments have demonstrated that the RMQ reliably captures stable, trait-like dispositions:

• Over a 4-week interval, Kruglanski et al. (2000) observed test-retest correlation coefficients of r = .83 for the Locomotion subscale and r = .81 for the Assessment subscale.
• In a 12-week longitudinal study examining self-regulatory shifts during organizational change, stability coefficients remained strong (Locomotion r = .76; Assessment r = .74), demonstrating that while situational primes can induce temporary locomotive or assessment states, the RMQ baseline score represents a remarkably durable personality orientation.

Factor Analysis

The latent structure of the Regulatory Mode Questionnaire has been extensively evaluated using both Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA).

1. Exploratory Factor Structure

During the initial scale construction phase, an initial pool of over 60 candidate items was subjected to principal axis factoring with both varimax (orthogonal) and promax (oblique) rotations. Two dominant factors unambiguously emerged prior to the scree plot drop-off, accounting for the primary common variance. Items with low primary loadings (< .35) or problematic cross-loadings (> .25 on the non-target factor) were systematically eliminated, yielding the final 12-item Locomotion and 12-item Assessment inventories alongside the 6 lie items.

2. Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA)

Subsequent validation studies have tested multiple competitive structural models via structural equation modeling (SEM):

• One-Factor Model: Collapsing all items onto a single generalized self-regulation factor produces extremely poor fit indices (e.g., χ²/df > 5.8, RMSEA > .11, CFI < .55), firmly ruling out unidimensionality.
• Two-Factor Correlated Model: Specifying Locomotion and Assessment as correlated latent dimensions demonstrates acceptable-to-good fit. However, the estimated latent correlation between the factors consistently approaches zero (r ≈ .02 to .08, p > .10), confirming true structural independence.
• Two-Factor Orthogonal Model: Constraining the inter-factor covariance to zero yields superior parsimony and exceptional fit indices across samples: Comparative Fit Index (CFI) ≥ .92 to .95; Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI) ≥ .91 to .94; Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR) ≤ .05; and Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA) ≤ .045 to .055 (90% CI [.040, .061]).

Standardized item factor loadings (λ) for the Locomotion factor generally range between .42 and .72, with items such as Item 8 (“I am a ‘doer’”) and Item 29 (“I am a ‘go-getter’”) demonstrating the highest factor loadings (> .68). For the Assessment factor, standardized loadings span from .38 to .71, with central markers such as Item 6, Item 9, and Item 11 consistently anchoring the latent evaluation construct.

Instrument / Measurement Tool

• Name: Regulatory Mode Questionnaire (RMQ)
• Alternative Titles: Kruglanski et al. Regulatory Mode Scale; Locomotion and Assessment Scales
• Authors: Arie W. Kruglanski, Erik P. Thompson, E. Tory Higgins, M. Nadir Atash, Antonio Pierro, James Y. Shah, and Scott Spiegel
• Publication Year: 2000
• Instrument Structure:
  • Total Items: 30 items
  • Subscales:
    • Locomotion Scale: 12 items
    • Assessment Scale: 12 items
    • Lie Scale (Social Desirability / Infrequency): 6 items
• Response Scale: 6-point Likert scale:
  • 1 = Strongly disagree
  • 2 = Moderately disagree
  • 3 = Slightly disagree
  • 4 = Slightly agree
  • 5 = Moderately agree
  • 6 = Strongly agree
• Administration Format: Self-administered paper-and-pencil or computerized questionnaire. Completion time is approximately 5 to 8 minutes.
• Scoring Instructions:
  • Step 1 – Reverse Coding: Invert the scores of reverse-keyed items so that 1 becomes 6, 2 becomes 5, 3 becomes 4, 4 becomes 3, 5 becomes 2, and 6 becomes 1 (Calculation: ( ext{Item}_{R} = 7 – ext{Raw Score} )).
    • Assessment Reverse-Coded Items: 2, 10, 27, 30
    • Locomotion Reverse-Coded Items: 13, 24
    • Lie Items: No reverse coding.
  • Step 2 – Subscale Calculation: Subscale scores are derived by calculating the mean score across the 12 items belonging to each subscale (dividing item total sums by 12), preserving the original 1 to 6 metric:
    • Locomotion Score: (Item 1 + Item 3 + Item 4 + Item 5 + Item 8 + Item 13R + Item 16 + Item 21 + Item 24R + Item 25 + Item 28 + Item 29) / 12
    • Assessment Score: (Item 2R + Item 6 + Item 7 + Item 9 + Item 10R + Item 11 + Item 15 + Item 19 + Item 20 + Item 22 + Item 27R + Item 30R) / 12
    • Lie Scale Score: (Item 12 + Item 14 + Item 17 + Item 18 + Item 23 + Item 26) / 6 (Values approaching 4.5 or higher indicate substantial social desirability bias or invalid responding).
  • Step 3 – Profile Interpretation: Individuals can be evaluated on each continuous dimension independently, or categorized into quadrant profiles via median/mean splits: High Locomotion / High Assessment (“Optimal Facilitators”), High Locomotion / Low Assessment (“Pure Doers”), Low Locomotion / High Assessment (“Paralyzed Evaluators”), and Low Locomotion / Low Assessment (“Disengaged/Passive Individuals”).

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Regulatory Mode Questionnaire was originally published in 2000 in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, copyrighted by the American Psychological Association (APA). The authors, led by Dr. A. W. Kruglanski and Dr. E. T. Higgins, dedicated the scale to open scientific access for academic, educational, and non-commercial research purposes. The instrument was historically made available to researchers via Dr. Higgins’s Motivation Science Center laboratory repository at Columbia University (Columbia Psychology Measures).

For standard non-funded academic research, thesis projects, and scientific investigations, the questionnaire may be administered without royalty fees or formal permission requests, provided that appropriate scholarly attribution is accorded to Kruglanski et al. (2000). Commercial utilization, corporate consulting implementations, for-profit assessment platforms, or integration into fee-charging digital products require prior written permission and licensing through the original copyright holders and the American Psychological Association.

References

• Avnet, T., & Higgins, E. T. (2003). Locomotion, assessment, and regulatory fit: Value transfer from “how” to “what.” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 39(5), 525–530. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0022-1031(03)00027-1
• Higgins, E. T., Kruglanski, A. W., & Pierro, A. (2003). Regulatory mode: Locomotion and assessment as distinct orientations. In M. P. Zanna (Ed.), Advances in Experimental Social Psychology (Vol. 35, pp. 293–344). Academic Press. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0065-2601(03)01005-0
• Komiya, A., Watabe, M., Miyamoto, Y., & Higgins, E. T. (2014). Cultural grounding of regulatory mode: Locomotion and assessment in Japan and the United States. Asian Journal of Social Psychology, 17(3), 206–215. https://doi.org/10.1111/ajsp.12059
• Kruglanski, A. W., Thompson, E. P., Higgins, E. T., Atash, M. N., Pierro, A., Shah, J. Y., & Spiegel, S. (2000). To “do the right thing” or to “just do it”: Locomotion and assessment as distinct self-regulatory imperatives. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 79(5), 793–815. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.79.5.793
• Pierro, A., Giacomantonio, M., Pica, G., Kruglanski, A. W., & Higgins, E. T. (2011). On the psychology of time in action: How locomotion and assessment impact procrastination. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 101(6), 1317–1331. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0025704
• Pierro, A., Kruglanski, A. W., & Higgins, E. T. (2006). Regulatory modes and the Big Five personality traits: Distinct associations of locomotion and assessment. Journal of Research in Personality, 40(5), 744–768. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrp.2005.09.006
• Pierro, A., Leder, S., Mannetti, L., Higgins, E. T., Kruglanski, A. W., & Aiello, A. (2008). Regulatory mode effects on counterfactual thinking and regret: “What might have been” for locomotors vs. assessors. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 44(2), 321–331. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2007.06.002

Items of the Scale