Are You Action-Oriented or State-Oriented? What Kuhl's Scale Measures

Here is one of the 36 situations on Julius Kuhl’s Action Control Scale. “When I know I must finish something soon:” followed by two choices. “I have to push myself to get started.” Or: “I find it easy to get it done and over with.”

Most people can feel which sentence is true on a Tuesday and which on a Sunday. Kuhl’s claim, developed from the early 1980s, was that some people land on the first answer far more consistently than others, and that this gap predicts something the usual goal-setting advice ignores.

Action orientation is a disposition to turn a decided intention into behavior without a long delay. State orientation is its opposite: staying with the current situation, a past failure or a pending choice, so that the intention waits. The terms come from Kuhl’s action control theory, laid out in the 1994 book Volition and Personality (edited with Jürgen Beckmann).

What does the Action Control Scale actually ask?

The scale gives two-option situations and asks which sounds more like you. The version used in most studies, the ACS-24, has two 12-item halves.

• After failure. “When I have lost something that is very valuable to me and I can’t find it anywhere:” versus “I have a hard time concentrating on something else” or “I put it out of my mind after a little while.”
• Decision and starting. The “push myself to get started” item above.

Kuhl’s labels for the poles are preoccupation and hesitation on the state side. A third scale in the longer ACS-90 covers volatility, losing interest in a task once it goes well.

In 2000, Diefendorff, Hall, Lord and Strean pooled six studies (N = 945) in the Journal of Applied Psychology and found that a three-factor structure of preoccupation, hesitation and volatility fit once weak items were dropped. They also reported that the revised subscales measured something distinct from cognitive ability and from personality traits. That is a statement about the questionnaire’s structure, not proof that hesitation causes underachievement.

What does the research show?

Two findings are worth keeping.

First, an enactment study. Chatterjee, Baumann, Osborne, Mahmud and Koole (2018, Frontiers in Psychology) surveyed 862 people in Germany, New Zealand and Bangladesh. Action orientation correlated at r = -0.51 with anxious motive enactment, meaning more action-oriented people felt less anxious when pursuing their own aims, and at r = 0.36 with well-being. The pattern held in all three countries. Mean scores sat around 11.4 to 11.7 out of 24 in each, so the sample was spread across the scale rather than split into two types.

Second, a mechanism study. In three experiments, Kazén, Baumann and Kuhl (2003, Motivation and Emotion) predicted that state-oriented people would mistake goals imposed by others for their own, and only when the tasks were unattractive. That is what they reported: the pattern showed up in state-oriented participants with low-appeal items and not in action-oriented ones. Kuhl’s idea is that state orientation weakens access to what you actually want, so outside demands slip through as “mine.”

Together, these hint that the stall is not simply laziness. It may start with hazy ownership of the goal.

What this does not tell you

The ACS is a self-report questionnaire, and most of what exists is correlation. The Chatterjee data cannot say whether hesitation causes anxiety or the reverse. The 2018 paper sets no cutoff that sorts people into “state-oriented,” and the scale is usually analyzed as a continuum. Treat any online quiz that gives you a type as entertainment.

What does it mean for goals and mornings?

If the hesitation sits at the moment of starting, the useful question is how much initiative a plan demands at that moment. Gollwitzer’s if-then plans, covered in the implementation intentions post, shrink that demand by tying the action to a cue. The overthinking tax is the cost of the state-oriented loop in everyday terms.

The first alarm is a clean test case, as waking up is a decision made groggy and alone. An app like DontSnooze removes part of that decision: your friends see the proof video or the miss, so the starting move happens at a fixed time in front of witnesses rather than on a mood. Nothing in Kuhl’s research tests that design, and it is an inference from the theory, not a result.

For anyone whose answer to the Kuhl item is usually “I have to push myself,” the practical reading is modest: a plan that needs no push at the moment it matters has a better chance than one that needs a good day.

Hesitation is not the only reason a task stalls: procrastination as mood repair covers the avoidance side, where the problem is a feeling to escape rather than a decision that will not close.