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TASK 8: Goal Setting (Mann et al. (GOAL CHARACTERISTICS (a) …
TASK 8: Goal Setting
Mann et al.
AIM: review + highlight the relevance of social psychological research on self-regulation for health-related theory and practice
Self-regulation
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b) Goal striving = planning and executing actions that promote goal attainment + shielding those goals from distraction or disruption
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ABANDONING GOALS
- problems originating with faulty goal setting
- conflict with other goals or immediate needs
- lack of adequate goal striving skills
- failure of self-regulation because people give up on a goal prematurely
Goal Striving
- People address self-regulatory challenges with multiple strategies
- directly promote execution of goal-directed behavior
- indirectly promote goal attainment by shielding goals from disruption
STRATEGIES
- Strategy 1: Prospection and Planning
- think prospectively about the future, anticipating goal-relevant events + mentally rehearsing goal-directed behaviors. Identify opportnities and obstacles
- Strategy 2: Automating Behavior. - Goal striving easier to accomplish if people do not have to consciously attend to their environment - Cued habits can similarly promote goal-directed behavior (excescie)
- People can also develop automatic processes that protect their goals from disruption
Implementation intentions = associations that can be formed simply by repeating the association several times in one’s head
- Strategy 3: Construal -explain why people find health-directed behaviors so positive + desirable in the distant future, yet so negative and undesirable once the future becomes now. Change in Construal = change in how people understand events over time .
- Simply adopting a more distanced perspective appears to make one think of immediate behaviors in a new light, helping people to relate the present to one’s long term future goals
- Strategy 4: Effortful Inhibition
- to protect one’s goals from distraction and disruption by other concerns
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Locke
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Goal mechanisms
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affect persistence - hard goals prolong effort (if agent is allowed to control the time they spend on task)
directive function - directs attention and effort towrds relevant activities (cognitively and behavioural)
affect action - indirect mechanism leading to the aroual, discover y and use of task relevant knowledge/strategies
Goal setting research
- When confronted with task goals, people automatically use the knowledge and skills they have already acquired that are relevant to goal attainment
- If the path to the goal is not a matter of using automatized skills, people draw from a repertoire of skills that they have used previously in related contexts + apply them to the present situation
- If the task for which a goal is assigned is new, people will engage in deliberate planning to develop strategies that will enable them to attain their goals
- People with high self-efficacy are more likely to develop effective task strategies
- When people are confronted with a task that is complex for them, urging them to do their best sometimes leads to better strategies than setting a specific difficult performance goal
- a performance goal can make people so anxious to succeed that they scramble to discover strategies in an unsystematic way + fail to learn what is effective
- set specific challenging learning goals, such as to discover a certain number of different strategies to master the task
- When people are trained in the proper strategies, those given specific high-performance goals are more likely to use those strategies than people given other types of goals their performance improves
- but if the strategy used by the person is inappropriate, then a difficult performance-outcome goal leads to worse performance than an easy goal
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Latham
automacity model
primed goals - unintentional and effortless cognitively, free individual from cognitive burden - improve efficiency
automaticity - lack of awareness that a mental representation in the brain ahs been activated- lack of conscious intention to initiate it , and inabiliti to controll it once initated
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Studies
STUDY 1
AIM: examine the effect on performance of three primes that connote the difficulty levels of a goal in the subconscious
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RESULTS:
- Participants who were primed with the difficult goal exerted more effort than those who were primed with the moderate or easy goal
- significant linear relationship between the difficulty level connoted by the three primes and subsequent task performance
Study 2
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METHOD: the same, but participants were asked to set number of arguments they will provide for a given thesis
RESULTS
- primed with a difficult goal - consciously chose to set a more difficult goal on a brainstorming task than those who were primed with an easier goal
- their performance was significantly higher
- Conscientiousness moderated the subconscious goal–performance relationship
- for participants who scored higher in conscientiousness, the more difficult prime led to higher performance
- self-set conscious goal partially mediated the subconscious goal–performance relationship
CONCLUSIONS
- an individual‘s conscious choice of the difficulty level of a specific goal to set was affected by the difficulty level of the goal that was primed in the subconscious
- this in turn led to higher task performance
provides support for automaticity model: a goal that is primed in the subconscious affects behaviour in the same way as a consciously set goal
- subconscious goal–performance relationship was partially mediated by the choice of the conscious goals that were self-set
- subconscious goals and consciously set goals work together to influence task performance
- conscientiousness moderates the subconscious goal–performance relationship