No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the author.
Abstract
As humans are social by nature, our every day behavior is greatly influenced by each other. Whether we compete or cooperate with others, we have to take into account their behavior when deciding a course of action of our own. An understanding of the intentions or goals of other humans would serve this purpose, because it allows to make predictions about how their actions will evolve. Hence, the ability to infer the goals of others by observing their behavior is very useful to us. Furthermore, copying the goals of other beings around us can be useful as well. For instance, when another individual wants to cooperate with us, it can be greatly beneficial to reciprocate his behavior with a similar cooperation goal. In social psychological research it has recently been demonstrated that copying a goal from another person can even occur outside our awareness, a phenomenon that has been termed goal contagion. The current thesis investigates this phenomenon, by studying several conditions under which it may or may not occur. Also, the underlying cognitive mechanisms that are responsible for goal contagion are mapped based on current models of the human mental system. Whether people catch on the goals of others may by dependent on a variety of factors, for instance the person we are observing, the goal that we infer from his behavior, or the circumstances we find ourselves in. This thesis focuses on a characteristic of the behavior that we observe, which is the amount of effort that someone invests in his behavior. As more effortful behavior represents more willingness to attain a goal, perceiving effort signals to observers that the goal the other is after is worthwhile, and hence triggers our interest. In a total of nine experiments, the current research shows that observers become more motivated to find out the goal that another is pursuing, when this other invests more effort in his behavior. Furthermore, people are more likely to make a spontaneous inference about the goal of another, when his behavior contains more effort. This leads to an greater adoption of the goal by observers, that is, they are more likely to copy a goal when they see it is pursued with more effort. Lastly, it was demonstrated that people’s motivation to attain a goal is directly influenced by the effort that another individual invest to attain that goal, without their awareness. Interestingly, these results were found even when the behavior was performed by a non-living object. After exposure to an animated film in which the ‘actor’ was a moving ball, participants copied its goal. The implications of the results above are discussed in relation to theories about social influence and unconscious processes in general.
ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any citations for this publication.
The theory outlined in the present chapter adopts a cognitive approach to motivation. In the pages that follow we describe a research program premised on the notion that the cognitive treatment affords conceptual and methodological advantages enabling new insights into problems of motivated action, self-regulation and self-control. We begin by placing our work in the broader historical context of social psychological theorizing about motivation and cognition. We then present our theoretical notions and trace their implications for a variety of psychological issues including activity-experience, goal-commitment, choice, and substitution. The gist of the chapter that follows describes our empirical research concerning a broad range of phenomena informed by the goal-systemic analysis. Motivation Versus Cognition, or Motivation as Cognition Motivation versus cognition: the “separatist program. ” Social psychological theories have often treated motivation as separate from cognition, and have often approached it in a somewhat static manner. The separatism of the “motivation versus cognition ” approach was manifest in several major formulations and debates. Thus, for example, the dissonance versus self-perception debate (Bem, 1972) pitted against each other motivational (i.e., dissonance) versus cognitive (i.e., self-perception) explanations of attitude change phenomena. A similar subsequent controversy pertained to the question of whether a motivational explanation of biased causal attributions in terms of ego-defensive tendencies (cf. Kelley, 1972) is valid, given the alternative possibility of a purely cognitive explanation (Miller & Ross, 1975). The separatism of the “motivation versus cognition ” approach assigned distinct functions to motivational and cognitive variables. This is apparent in major social psychological notions of persuasion, judgment or impression formation. For instance, in the popular dual-mode theories of
Person perception includes three sequential processes: categorization (what is the actor doing?), characterization (what trait does the action imply?), and correction (what situational constraints may have caused the action?). We argue that correction is less automatic (i.e., more easily disrupted) than either categorization or characterization. In Experiment 1, subjects observed a target behave anxiously in an anxiety-provoking situation. In Experiment 2, subjects listened to a target read a political speech that he had been constrained to write. In both experiments, control subjects used information about situational constraints when drawing inferences about the target, but cognitively busy subjects (who performed an additional cognitive task during encoding) did not. The results (a) suggest that person perception is a combination of lower and higher order processes that differ in their susceptibility to disruption and (b) highlight the fundamental differences between active and passive perceivers. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Five experiments involving 447 undergraduates used a self-probe methodology in both simulated and real conditions to demonstrate that individuals do engage in spontaneous attributional search. Results show that this search is most likely when the outcome of an event is negative and unexpected. Content analysis of attributional questions also suggests that causal search is biased toward internality after failure but toward externality following success. Data reveal that the most commonly used heuristic in attributional search is to center on the locus and control dimensions of causality. (29 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Theoretical and empirical work on the processes by which dispositional characteristics are attributed to others has focused almost exclusively on how such processes proceed once the perceiver has been motivated to initiate them. The problem of identifying the factors which prompt the perceiver to engage in an attributional analysis in the first place has been relatively ignored. It was hypothesized that high outcome dependency upon another, under conditions of high unfamiliarity, is associated with the initiation of an attributional analysis as evidenced by (a) increased attention to the other, (b) better memory of the other's characteristics and behavior, (c) more extreme and confidently given evaluations of the other on a variety of dispositional trait dimensions, and (d) increased attraction to the other. These hypotheses were tested within the context of a study of heterosexual dating relationships in which 27 male and 27 female 18-22 yr old volunteers anticipated varying degrees of dependence upon another for their dating outcomes. Findings support the view that the data processing operations of the social perceiver--from attention to memory to attribution--are part of a unified whole and may be viewed as manifestations of an underlying motivation to predict and control the social environment. (20 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Past research has generated mixed support among social scientists for the utility of social norms in accounting for human behavior. We argue that norms do have a substantial impact on human action; however, the impact can only be properly recognized when researchers (a) separate 2 types of norms that at times act antagonistically in a situation—injunctive norms (what most others approve or disapprove) and descriptive norms (what most others do)—and (b) focus Ss' attention principally on the type of norm being studied. In 5 natural settings, focusing Ss on either the descriptive norms or the injunctive norms regarding littering caused the Ss' littering decisions to change only in accord with the dictates of the then more salient type of norm. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Discusses issues in the cognitive representation and control of action from the perspective of action identification theory. This theory holds that any action can be identified in many ways, ranging from low-level identities that specify how the action is performed to high-level identities that signify why or with what effect the action is performed. The level of identification most likely to be adopted by an actor is dictated by processes reflecting a trade-off between concerns for comprehensive action understanding and effective action maintenance. This suggests that the actor is always sensitive to contextual cues to higher levels of identification but moves to lower levels of identification if the action proves difficult to maintain with higher level identities in mind. These processes are documented empirically, as is their coordinated interplay in promoting a level of prepotent identification that matches the upper limits of the actor's capacity to perform the action. Implications are developed for action stability, the psychology of performance impairment, personal vs situational causation, and the behavioral bases of self-understanding. (87 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Three studies examine the hypothesis that people spontaneously (i.e., unintentionally and without awareness of doing so) infer causes (the Spontaneous Causal Inference, or SCI, hypothesis). Using a cued-recall paradigm, Study 1 examines whether SCIs occur and Study 2 allows for a comparison between implicitly inferred and explicitly mentioned causes. Study 3 examines whether SCIs can be fully explained in terms of spreading activation to general, abstract schemes. It is suggested that STIs (e.g., Winter & Uleman, 1984), and spontaneous predicting inferences (e.g., and ), may be better understood in their relation to SCIs.
Previous research in the development of causal schemata has relied upon verbal descriptions of behavior to convey causally relevant information. In the present study, however, a perceptual analogue of Kelley's augmentation principle was created in animated films depicting the movements of 2 objects toward a goal--1 which overcame an obstacle (inhibitory cause present) and 1 which did not (inhibitory cause absent). Both forced-choice and scalar measures indicated that kindergarten, second, and fourth graders all perceived greater motivation (internal facilitative cause) in the inhibited than noninhibited object, but that age differences emerged in the ability to explain these responses. In a second experiment, the 2 target objects were inhibited by obstacles of different sizes. For this quantitative version of the principle, age differences emerged for all measures; fourth graders and most second graders responded in accord with augmentation-principle predictions. These results were compared with the earlier findings that kindergarten and fourth-grade children did not understand this principle. The contrasting methods of stimulus presentation were discussed and implications of this technique for attribution research were noted.
In this article, we attempt to distinguish between the properties of moderator and mediator variables at a number of levels. First, we seek to make theorists and researchers aware of the importance of not using the terms moderator and mediator interchangeably by carefully elaborating, both conceptually and strategically, the many ways in which moderators and mediators differ. We then go beyond this largely pedagogical function and delineate the conceptual and strategic implications of making use of such distinctions with regard to a wide range of phenomena, including control and stress, attitudes, and personality traits. We also provide a specific compendium of analytic procedures appropriate for making the most effective use of the moderator and mediator distinction, both separately and in terms of a broader causal system that includes both moderators and mediators.
Do people make trait inferences, even without intentions or instructions, at the encoding stage of processing behavioral information? Tulving's encoding specificity paradigm (Tulving & Thomson, 1973) was adapted for two recall experiments. Under memory instructions only, subjects read sentences describing people performing actions that implied traits. Later, subjects recalled each sentence under one of three cuing conditions: (a) a dispositional cue (e.g., generous), (b) a strong, nondispositional semantic associate to an important sentence word; or (c) no cue. Recall was best when cued by the disposition words. Subjects were unaware of having made trait inferences. Interpreted in terms of encoding specificity, these results indicate that subjects unintentionally made trait inferences at encoding. This suggests that attributions may be made spontaneously, as part of the routine comprehension of social events.
The authors describe a constructionist theory that accounts for the knowledge-based inferences that are constructed when readers comprehend narrative text. Readers potentially generate a rich variety of inferences when they construct a referential situation model of what the text is about. The proposed constructionist theory specifies that some, but not all, of this information is constructed under most conditions of comprehension. The distinctive assumptions of the constructionist theory embrace a principle of search (or effort) after meaning. According to this principle, readers attempt to construct a meaning representation that addresses the reader's goals, that is coherent at both local and global levels, and that explains why actions, events, and states are mentioned in the text. This study reviews empirical evidence that addresses this theory and contrasts it with alternative theoretical frameworks.
To explain social learning without invoking the cognitively complex concept of imitation, many learning mechanisms have been proposed. Borrowing an idea used routinely in cognitive psychology, we argue that most of these alternatives can be subsumed under a single process, priming, in which input increases the activation of stored internal representations. Imitation itself has generally been seen as a "special faculty." This has diverted much research towards the all-or-none question of whether an animal can imitate, with disappointingly inconclusive results. In the great apes, however, voluntary, learned behaviour is organized hierarchically. This means that imitation can occur at various levels, of which we single out two clearly distinct ones: the "action level," a rather detailed and linear specification of sequential acts, and the "program level," a broader description of subroutine structure and the hierarchical layout of a behavioural "program." Program level imitation is a high-level, constructive mechanism, adapted for the efficient learning of complex skills and thus not evident in the simple manipulations used to test for imitation in the laboratory. As examples, we describe the food-preparation techniques of wild mountain gorillas and the imitative behaviour of orangutans undergoing "rehabilitation" to the wild. Representing and manipulating relations between objects seems to be one basic building block in their hierarchical programs. There is evidence that great apes suffer from a stricter capacity limit than humans in the hierarchical depth of planning. We re-interpret some chimpanzee behaviour previously described as "emulation" and suggest that all great apes may be able to imitate at the program level. Action level imitation is seldom observed in great ape skill learning, and may have a largely social role, even in humans.
This study tested the idea of habits as a form of goal-directed automatic behavior. Expanding on the idea that habits are mentally represented as associations between goals and actions, it was proposed that goals are capable of activating the habitual action. More specific, when habits are established (e.g., frequent cycling to the university), the very activation of the goal to act (e.g., having to attend lectures at the university) automatically evokes the habitual response (e.g., bicycle). Indeed, it was tested and confirmed that, when behavior is habitual, behavioral responses are activated automatically. In addition, the results of 3 experiments indicated that (a) the automaticity in habits is conditional on the presence of an active goal (cf. goal-dependent automaticity; J. A. Bargh, 1989), supporting the idea that habits are mentally represented as goal-action links, and (b) the formation of implementation intentions (i.e., the creation of a strong mental link between a goal and action) may simulate goal-directed automaticity in habits.
It is proposed that goals can be activated outside of awareness and then operate nonconsciously to guide self-regulation effectively (J. A. Bargh, 1990). Five experiments are reported in which the goal either to perform well or to cooperate was activated, without the awareness of participants, through a priming manipulation. In Experiment 1 priming of the goal to perform well caused participants to perform comparatively better on an intellectual task. In Experiment 2 priming of the goal to cooperate caused participants to replenish a commonly held resource more readily. Experiment 3 used a dissociation paradigm to rule out perceptual-construal alternative explanations. Experiments 4 and 5 demonstrated that action guided by nonconsciously activated goals manifests two classic content-free features of the pursuit of consciously held goals. Nonconsciously activated goals effectively guide action, enabling adaptation to ongoing situational demands.
Motion is a fundamental source of information for basic human interpretations; it is basic to the fundamental concept of causality and, the present model argues, equally basic to the fundamental concept of intentionality.
The model is based on two main assumptions: When an infant perceives an object (1) moving spontaneously and (2) displaying goaldirected action, it will interpret the object as intentional and assign to it the unique properties of the psychological domain. The key property tested was: Do infants attribute value to interactions between intentional objects using criteria specified by the model?
We showed infants (average age 52 weeks) computer-generated animations of spontaneously moving “balls,” using looking time in a standard habituation/dishabituation paradigm. In two positive interactions, one ball either “caressed” another, or “helped” it achieve its goal; whereas in two negative interactions, one ball either “hit“ another, or “prevented” it from achieving its goal. In keeping with predictions of the model, when transferred to a negative condition, infants who had been habituated on a positive condition showed greater dishabituation than those habituated on a negative condition. The results could not be easily explained by the similarity relations among the animations depicting the interactions.
The results suggest that well before the age when the child can ascribe mental states or has a “theory of mind,” it recognizes the goals of self-propelled objects and attributes value to the interactions between them.
This chapter focuses on preconscious triggering and pursuit of temporarily adopted goals. It introduces seeming paradoxes of preconscious control, such as the notions of unintended intentions and uncontrolled control, and examines the theory and evidence that provides the rationale and support for the preconscious regulation of temporary goals. There are three theoretical points that provide the basis for implicit volition model: goals are knowledge structures that can be triggered by relevant cues in the environment without the person's awareness that any given knowledge structure has attained a state of heightened fluency or accessibility; goal can come to be automatically activated through frequent and habitual pairing of specific goals with specific features of the environment; and an aversive state is experienced when a goal has not been met. The chapter determines that a goal can be consciously selected but trigger implicit processes regulating movement toward successfully attaining the goal. The goal itself can be implicitly triggered and lead to both explicit and implicit operations aimed at goal attainment.
Three experiments investigated whether inferring goals from another agent's behavior is a motivational process and, more specifically, whether the motivation to infer a goal is enhanced by the amount of behavioral effort that is perceived. Participants were exposed to behavior that varied in intensity to induce different perceived amounts of effort, after which the motivation to infer the goal of the actor's behavior was measured. Experiment 1 employed a text comprehension task, whereas Experiment 2 used an animated film task. Subjective experiences were used to measure the motivation to infer the goal. A third experiment assessed motivation with a behavioral measure. Results showed that an increase in perceived effort enhances the motivation to infer the goal of an actor, and that this effect was specific for situations in which goal content was unknown. Implications for the literature on goal inferences are discussed.
Most attribution theories focus on inductive inferences and abstract causal categories. By contrast, goal-based and knowledge structure theories focus on people's perceptions of intentional actions, their deductive inferences, and their concrete explanations of actions. Goal-based theories have demonstrated the importance of goals and intentions as explanations. However, research shows that explanations of goal-based actions reflect the extremity and controllability of the actions, the presence of obstructions, and the type of causal question eliciting the explanation. These factors determine whether people prefer to invoke goals or enabling conditions (or conjunctions) as explanations. Judgments of explanations also reflect communicative principles or informativeness and relevance, more than logical judgments of probability and necessity. The goal-based approach is often seen as an alternative to the inductive covariational approach, but the two lines of research can be integrated.
The goal of behavioral control is of central importance in everyday life. When the production of an unwanted action can have deleterious consequences for perceivers, there is considerable virtue in the possession of a mental system that edits its behavioral products to meet the demands of a challenging world. Accordingly, in an attempt to extend existing work on this topic (e.g., Bargh, Chen, & Burrows, 1996), in the present research we investigated the extent to which the automatic elicitation of action may be moderated by features of the task environment and perceivers' goal states. Our findings were unequivocal. When inhibitory cues were present in the environment (i.e., Experiment 1), or perceivers had a competing goal in mind (i.e., Experiment 2), automatic behavioral priming effects were eliminated. We consider the implications of our findings for recent treatments of behavioral priming and action control.
A review of recent evidence indicates that contingent reinforcement is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for operant learning. This dilemma reopens the old question of "what is learned." It is proposed that what laboratory Ss characteristically learn is not a response to a stimulus, but rather 2 kinds of expectancies. 1 kind of expectancy corresponds rather accurately with environmental stimulus-outcome contingencies, while the 2nd is a less faithful representation of response-outcome contingencies. The reinforcement procedure merely permits both expectancies to be learned. (36 ref.) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Tested the hypothesis that individuals engage in more thorough attributional processing for unexpected events than they do for expected events. 51 undergraduates observed the experimenter asking a confederate either a small or large favor. The small request led to an expectancy of compliance; the large request led to expectancy of refusal. The confederate then either did or did not comply with the request, thus either confirming or disconfirming Ss' expectancies. Ss were than allowed to look at any 5 of the confederates' responses to a 10-item questionnaire that the confederate had supposedly filled out earlier. Five of the items on the questionnaire were relevant to helping, and 5 were of general interest. As predicted, Ss chose more helping-relevant items when their expectancies had been disconfirmed. Implications for attributions for the behavior of stereotyped out-group members are discussed. (33 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Investigated whether children would re-enact what an adult actually did or what the adult intended to do. In Experiment, 1 children were shown an adult who tried, but failed, to perform certain target acts. Completed target acts were thus not observed. Children in comparison groups either saw the full target act or appropriate controls. Results showed that children could infer the adult's intended act by watching the failed attempts. Experiment 2 tested children's understanding of an inanimate object that traced the same movements as the person had followed. Children showed a completely different reaction to the mechanical device than to the person: They did not produce the target acts in this case. Eighteen-mo-olds situate people within a psychological framework that differentiates between the surface behavior of people and a deeper level involving goals and intentions. They have already adopted a fundamental aspect of folk psychology—persons (but not inanimate objects) are understood within a framework involving goals and intentions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
In the 1st session of each of 2 studies, 48 undergraduates' accessible traits were elicited by asking them to list the characteristics of different people, with accessibility defined as frequency of output (Study 1) or primacy of output (Study 2). In the 2nd session, held 1 or 2 wks later, Ss read an essay describing the behaviors of a target person. The essay contained both accessible and inaccessible trait-related information for each S, with different traits being accessible or inaccessible for different Ss. Both studies found that Ss deleted significantly more inaccessible than accessible trait-related information in their impressions and reproductions of the target information. This effect on impressions and reproductions was evident 2 wks after exposure to the target information. Implications of this approach for personality differences, interpersonal conflict and attraction, similarity of self and other judgments, and therapeutic intervention are discussed. (55 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
What was noted by E. J. Langer (1978) remains true today: that much of contemporary psychological research is based on the assumption that people are consciously and systematically processing incoming information in order to construe and interpret their world and to plan and engage in courses of action. As did Langer, the authors question this assumption. First, they review evidence that the ability to exercise such conscious, intentional control is actually quite limited, so that most of moment-to-moment psychological life must occur through nonconscious means if it is to occur at all. The authors then describe the different possible mechanisms that produce automatic, environmental control over these various phenomena and review evidence establishing both the existence of these mechanisms as well as their consequences for judgments, emotions, and behavior. Three major forms of automatic self-regulation are identified: an automatic effect of perception on action, automatic goal pursuit, and a continual automatic evaluation of one's experience. From the accumulating evidence, the authors conclude that these various nonconscious mental systems perform the lion's share of the self-regulatory burden, beneficently keeping the individual grounded in his or her current environment. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
It is argued that goals are central to the meaning and structure of many traits and help define the prototypicality structure of those traits. Partly on the basis of L. W. Barsalou's (1985) work on goal-derived categories, it was predicted that goals help define the judged prototypicality of many trait-related behaviors and the confidence with which people make trait inferences from those behaviors. Consistent with this hypothesis, ratings of the extent to which behaviors achieved the goal associated with a trait strongly predicted the typicality of the behaviors. Furthermore, the rated goal-relatedness of a behavior also strongly predicted the confidence with which people would make a trait inference from that behavior. It is suggested that goals play a major role in the conceptual coherence of traits and other social categories. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Tested, in 2 experiments, predictions of a formal model that decomposes the attribution of personal dispositions into identification and dispositional inference processes. The model assumes that identification processes initially represent the incoming stimulus information in terms of meaningful attribution-relevant categories. The results of the identification process serve as input for dispositional inference processes wherein causal schemata guide the inference of personal dispositions. The 2 illustrative experiments traced the processing of behavioral and situational information at the identification and dispositional inference stages and examined attributions as a joint product of the different stages. Findings and previous relevant research demonstrate that the proposed model can help reconcile conflicting findings in the literature, reveal new attributional phenomena, and improve understanding of the cognitive processes that produce self- and other-attribution. Dispositional attribution calculations are appended. (90 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Attempted a field replication of J. F. Bryan and E. A. Locke's (see record
1967-15919-001) general version of Parkinson's Law (i.e., effort is adjusted to the difficulty of the task). The principle implies greater effort on a given task when time restrictions are placed on task completion than when there are no such restrictions. As predicted, members of logging crews (N = 379) showed a significantly higher rate of output when limited to mill deliveries on 1 or 2 days/wk than when no such buying restrictions were in effect. Since both owners and crew members were paid on a piece-rate basis, there was an incentive to maximize production early when restrictions were operative. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
any judgment, attributional or otherwise, is at once motivated and informationally based (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Although it is clear that nonconscious primes can affect behavioral decisions, the extent to which the prime-to-behavior link is mediated by intervening interpretative processes is still unknown. The present research examined the mediational role of “situational construals” by assessing the effects of cooperative versus competitive primes on participants’ construals of, and responses to, the prisoner’s dilemma. As predicted, this priming manipulation influenced participants’ construals of the game (assessed by the participants’ ratings of the appropriateness of different “names for the game” and their estimates of how random others would play), and their own expressed willingness to cooperate versus defect. Most crucially, a mediational analysis and a manipulation of the order in which these dependent variables were measured established that the prime-to-behavior link can be strengthened by an intervening task calling for explicit construal of the situation. The interplay of situational construal and implicit primes in producing deliberative behavior is discussed.
Building on recent research into the emergence of human motivation and goal pursuit in the absence of the conscious awareness of the source of this pursuit, the present article aimed to shed light on how states of deprivation (e.g., deprivation of fluid) actually produce the motivation and corresponding behavior that lifts the deprivation. Two studies established that when participants were relatively deprived of fluids, they experienced enhanced motivation to drink and consumed more fluid in an alleged tasting test, and these effects were more pronounced when the concept of drinking was rendered accessible by subliminal priming. These results suggest that specific motivational goal states and corresponding behaviors do not arise directly from deprivation per se, but that accessible goal-related cognitions play a role in this process. Implications for theory and research on deprivation and non-conscious goal pursuit are briefly discussed.
The ACT theory of factual memory is presented. According to this theory, information is encoded in an all-or-none manner into cognitive units and the strength of these units increases with practice and decays with delay. The essential process to memory performance is the retrieval operation. It is proposed that the cognitive units form an interconnected network and that retrieval is performed by spreading activation throughout the network. Level of activation in the network determines rate and probability of recall. With these assumptions in place, the ACT theory is shown to predict interference results in memory, judgements of associative relatedness, impact of extensive practice on memory, the differences between recognition and recall, effects of elaborative processing, and effects of reconstructive recall.
The research presented here suggests that effort is used as a heuristic for quality. Participants rating a poem (Experiment 1), a painting (Experiment 2), or a suit of armor (Experiment 3) provided higher ratings of quality, value, and liking for the work the more time and effort they thought it took to produce. Experiment 3 showed that the use of the effort heuristic, as with all heuristics, is moderated by ambiguity: Participants were more influenced by effort when the quality of the object being evaluated was difficult to ascertain. Discussion centers on the implications of the effort heuristic for everyday judgment and decision-making.
Recent research demonstrates that people spontaneously, i.e., without conscious intent, infer and pursue the goals perceived in others’ behavior, a phenomenon termed goal contagion [Aarts, H., Gollwitzer, P., & Hassin, R. R. (2004). Goal contagion: perceiving is for pursuing. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 87, 23–27]. Three experiments extend this work by studying the basic role of perceived behavioral effort in goal inference and pursuit. In an adaptation of the Animated Film Technique, participants were exposed to a movie featuring movements of a ball that implied the goal of helping. The amount of effort in pursuing the implied goal was experimentally varied. Results showed that an increase in perceived effort led to stronger inferences of the implied goal, as was established by enhanced accessibility of the goal representation in a word completion and lexical decision task. Furthermore, as a result of these inferences, participants more strongly pursued the inferred goal of helping. Implications for research on goal inferences and pursuit are briefly discussed.
We examine how one aspect of the service encounter, perceived employee effort, affects customer satisfaction with service transactions. Results from two empirical studies indicate that perceived effort has a strong positive impact on transaction satisfaction, and this effect is not eliminated when the perceived success of the service outcome is statistically controlled. This shows that employee effort is appreciated by customers in its own right, regardless of its impact on the outcome. Additional analyses show that outcome can bias effort judgments. That is, when customers do not get the service outcome they want, they are less likely to recognize employee effort and hard work. The study results suggest implications for motivation, attribution, and customer satisfaction theories, as well as for managing the service encounter.
Recent research demonstrates that goal pursuit can be instigated without conscious interventions when the mental accessibility of goal representations is enhanced by environmental cues. However, the mechanisms producing this non-conscious, motivational, goal-directed activity are not clearly addressed in the literature. In this chapter we present a framework within which the non-conscious activation of goal-directed behaviour can be understood. The framework departs from the idea that a goal is represented as a desired state and identifies three characteristics of this representation that render non-conscious goal pursuit more likely to occur: its mental accessibility, the discrepancy of the represented state with the actual state, and its association with positive affect. We present findings, largely established in our own labs, that demonstrate the crucial role of these three factors. We will close the chapter by showing how the framework can help to address some of the pressing issues in the research on non-conscious goal pursuit.
Three experiments assessed the effects of mood on symptom appraisal, health behavior self-efficacy, outcome expectations, and perceptions of vulnerability. Ss in Experiments 1 and 2 were acutely ill, whereas Ss in Experiment 3 were healthy. In each experiment, happy, sad, and neutral moods were induced. In Experiment 1, Ss who experienced sadness reported more aches and pains and greater discomfort than happy Ss. Sad Ss were less confident that they could carry out illness-alleviating behaviors. Experiments 2 and 3 demonstrated that mood's influence on vulnerability perceptions is moderated by health status. Although mood had little impact on perceptions of vulnerability among ill Ss, probability estimates of future negative health-relevant events among healthy Ss were mood sensitive. Seeing oneself as invulnerable to future negative events was accentuated among happy Ss and attenuated among sad Ss. Mood may be an important determinant of care seeking, adherence, and recovery from illness.
Past research has shown rather consistently that positive mood states lead to increased helpfulness. In an expanded analysis of the published literature, we examined six distinct views about this relation: the focus of attention, objective self-awareness, separate process, social outlook, mood maintenance, and concomitance hypotheses. For each of 61 positive affect conditions in which it was possible to generate an effect-size estimate corresponding to the relative degree of helpfulness exhibited by positive mood subjects (compared with neutral affect subjects), judges assessed the contextual levels of variables relevant to each of the six hypotheses by reading the Method section of each article. Higher-order partial correlation coefficients were then calculated to isolate the independent contribution of each of the theoretically relevant variables to the variation among the 61 effect sizes. The results support the focus of attention, separate process, social outlook, and mood maintenance hypotheses, and partially support the objective self-awareness and concomitance hypotheses.
A model of causal reasoning based on Schank and Abelson's (1977) analysis of knowledge structures is presented. The first part of this article outlines the necessary characteristics of such a model. It is argued that a central attributional problem is to explain extended sequences of behavior. To do this people must relate actions in a sequence to one another and construct a coherent scenario from them. Because the relation among actions is not given, people must use detailed social and physical knowledge to make connecting inferences. The resulting scenario typically includes information about the plans and goals of the actor. The second part of this article analyzes how the knowledge structures outlined by Schank and Abelson (1977)--scripts, plans, goals, and themes--can be used to construct such causal scenarios, and it presents a process model for the construction of such scenarios. The last part of this article examines the implications of this model and its relations to other attribution models by Kelley (1967, 1971a, 1971b) and Jones (Jones & Davis, 1965; Jones & McGillis, 1976).
Advances a theory of learning which wholly discards the response-reinforcement principle. It attributes learned behavior modifications to the building of central representations of contingencies between situational stimuli and incentive stimuli; certain situational stimuli are thereby turned into conditioned incentive-discriminative stimuli. It is proposed that central motivational states, generated by the joint influence of organismic-state variables and unconditioned or conditioned incentive stimuli, influence the response-eliciting potency of particular situational stimuli. The specific response form that emerges is a fresh construction created by the momentary motivational state and the spatio-temporal distribution of various distal and contact discriminative-incentive stimuli in the situation. These and related working assumptions are shown to clarify certain long-standing problems of behavior theory and to provide a basis for deriving satisfactory interpretations of several hitherto perplexing phenomena of conditioning, motivational modulation of instrumental behavior, and observational learning. (2 p ref)
This paper reports a habituation study indicating that 12-month-old infants can take the "intentional stance" in interpreting the goal-directed spatial behavior of a rational agent. First, we examine previous empirical claims suggesting that the ability to attribute intentions to others emerges during the second half of the first year. It is argued that neither the perceptual evidence (concerning the early ability to discriminate agents), nor the behavioral data (indicating the use of communicative gestures for instrumental purposes) are sufficient to support such claims about the early appearance of a theory of mind, as there are alternative explanations for these phenomena in terms of simpler psychological processes. It is then suggested that to show that an infant indeed attributes an intention to interpret the goal-directed behavior of a rational agent, one needs to demonstrate that the baby can generate an expectation about the most rational future means action that the agent will perform in a new situation to achieve its goal. We then describe a visual habituation study that meets this requirement. The results demonstrate that based on the equifinal structure of an agent's spatial behavior, 12-month-old infants can identify the agent's goal and interpret its actions causally in relation to it. Furthermore, our study indicates that infants of this age are able to evaluate the rationality of the agent's goal-directed actions, which is a necessary requirement for applying the intentional stance. In closing, we discuss some of the theoretical and methodological implications of our study.
The influences of goal-related actions and goal information on children's try-and-want perceptions were investigated with an action-perception approach (i.e., Heider, 1958). Kindergartners, second graders, and fifth graders heard stories that depicted actors engaged in one action, that same action three times, or three equifinal actions to attain a positive or negative goal. The children rated how much actors tried and wanted to attain the goal. The findings indicate that the actors who engaged in only one action were perceived to have tried and wanted the least, and the actors who engaged in equifinal actions were perceived to have tried and wanted the most. The actors who engaged in one action were not significantly differentiated from those who engaged in repetitive actions. However, the actors who engaged in repetitive actions were significantly differentiated from those who engaged in equifinal actions. For try ratings only, the children made all expected differentiations of actors by goal-related action in negative goal conditions, whereas fewer differentiations were made of actors in positive goal conditions. Age-related findings indicate that only younger children perceived that the actors who pursued positive goals tried and wanted more than those who pursued negative goals.
Does the chimpanzee attribute goals to others? Recent infant studies using the looking time measure have been interpreted as evidence that human infants attribute goals. An experiment modeled on these studies was carried out on chimpanzees, and the chimpanzees responded the way infants do. This indicates that chimpanzees also attribute goals and hence that this capacity is not distinctively human.
Certain simple visual displays consisting of moving 2-D geometric shapes can give rise to percepts with high-level properties such as causality and animacy. This article reviews recent research on such phenomena, which began with the classic work of Michotte and of Heider and Simmel. The importance of such phenomena stems in part from the fact that these interpretations seem to be largely perceptual in nature - to be fairly fast, automatic, irresistible and highly stimulus driven - despite the fact that they involve impressions typically associated with higher-level cognitive processing. This research suggests that just as the visual system works to recover the physical structure of the world by inferring properties such as 3-D shape, so too does it work to recover the causal and social structure of the world by inferring properties such as causality and animacy.
How effectively can groups of people make yes-or-no decisions? To answer this question, we used signal-detection theory to model the behavior of groups of human participants in a visual detection task. The detection model specifies how performance depends on the group's size, the competence of the members, the correlation among members' judgments, the constraints on member interaction, and the group's decision rule. The model also allows specification of performance efficiency, which is a measure of how closely a group's performance matches the statistically optimal group. The performance of our groups was consistent with the theoretical predictions, but efficiency decreased as group size increased. This result was attributable to a decrease in the effort that members gave to their individual tasks rather than to an inefficiency in combining the information in the members' judgments.
The mere psychological presence of relationship partners was hypothesized to trigger interpersonal goals that are then pursued nonconsciously. Qualitative data suggested that people tend to pursue different interpersonal goals within different types of relationships (e.g., mother, best friend, coworker). In several studies, priming participants' relationship representations produced goal-directed behavior (achievement, helping, understanding) in line with the previously assessed goal content of those representations. These findings support the hypothesis that interpersonal goals are component features of relationship representations and that mere activation of those representations, even in the partner's physical absence, causes the goals to become active and to guide behavior nonconsciously within the current situation.