Tying the value of goals to social class.

Although everyone strives toward valued goals, we suggest that not everyone will be perceived as doing so equally. In this research, we examine the tendency to use social class as a cue to understand the importance of others' goals. Six studies find evidence of a goal-value bias: Observers perceive goals across a variety of domains as more valuable to higher class than to lower class individuals (Studies 1-6).

The Effects of Extra-Team Goal Disclosure on Team Performance, Viability, and Satisfaction.

In addition to the team's shared goals, team members also often hold goals unrelated to the team. Research about such goals, which we call "extra-team goals" (ETGs), has been limited. In the current research, we examine how awareness of a team member's ETGs affects team outcomes.

Self-regulatory consequences of observing others making goal progress: A longitudinal field study in weight loss groups.

Objective: What happens when people see others making progress toward a goal that they also hold? Is it motivating or could it undermine goal pursuit because people feel that they have made progress themselves (i.e., they experience vicarious goal satiation)?

Methods: We investigated these questions in a longitudinal field context - a group weight loss programme.

Lean in messages increase attributions of women's responsibility for gender inequality.

Although women's underrepresentation in senior-level positions in the workplace has multiple causes, women's self-improvement or "empowerment" at work has recently attracted cultural attention as a solution. For example, the bestselling book states that women can tackle gender inequality themselves by overcoming the "internal barriers" (e.g.

Power and the pursuit of a partner's goals.

We investigated how power dynamics in close relationships influence the tendency to devote resources to the pursuit of goals valued by relationship partners, hypothesizing that low (vs. high) power in relationships would lead individuals to center their individual goal pursuit around the goals of their partners. We study 2 related phenomena: partner goal prioritization, whereby individuals pursue goals on behalf of their partners, and partner goal contagion, whereby individuals identify and adopt as their own the goals that their partner pursues.

Transactive goal dynamics.

Transactive goal dynamics (TGD) theory conceptualizes 2 or more interdependent people as 1 single self-regulating system. Six tenets describe the nature of goal interdependence, predict its emergence, predict when it will lead to positive goal outcomes during and after the relationship, and predict the consequences for the relationship. Both partners in a TGD system possess and pursue self-oriented, partner-oriented, and system-oriented goals, and all of these goals and pursuits are interdependent.

Close relationships and self-regulation: How relationship satisfaction facilitates momentary goal pursuit.

In the new millennium, scholars have built a robust intersection between close-relationships research and self-regulation research. However, virtually no work has investigated how the most basic and broad indicator of relationship quality, relationship satisfaction, affects self-regulation and vice versa. In the present research, we show that higher relationship satisfaction promotes a motivational mind-set that is conducive for effective self-regulation, and thus for goal progress and performance.

The burden of responsibility: Interpersonal costs of high self-control.

The psychological literature on self-control has illustrated the many benefits experienced by people with high self-control, who are more successful both personally and interpersonally. In the current research, we explore the possibility that having high self-control also may have some interpersonal costs, leading individuals to become burdened by others' reliance. In Studies 1 and 2, we examined the effects of actors' self-control on observers' performance expectations and found that observers had higher performance expectations for actors with high (vs.

The Manhattan effect: when relationship commitment fails to promote support for partners' interests.

Research on close relationships has frequently contrasted one's own interests with the interests of the partner or the relationship and has tended to view the partner's and the relationship's interests as inherently aligned. The present article demonstrated that relationship commitment typically causes people to support their partner's personal interests but that this effect gets weaker to the extent that those interests misalign or even threaten the relationship. Studies 1a and 1b showed that (a) despite their strong correlation, partner-oriented and relationship-oriented concerns in goal-directed behaviors are separable and (b) relationship commitment strengthens only the link between relationship-oriented motivation and the goal pursuit (not the link between partner-oriented motivation and the goal pursuit).

A functional basis for structure-seeking: exposure to structure promotes willingness to engage in motivated action.

A recurring observation of experimental psychologists is that people prefer, seek out, and even selectively "see" structure in their social and natural environments. Structure-seeking has been observed across a wide range of phenomena--from the detection of patterns in random arrays to affinities for order-providing political, religious, social, and scientific worldviews--and is exacerbated under psychological threat. Why are people motivated for structure? An intriguing, but untested, explanation holds that perceiving structure, even in domains unrelated to one's current behavioral context, can facilitate willingness to take goal-directed actions.

Riding other people's coattails: individuals with low self-control value self-control in other people.

Two laboratory experiments and one dyadic study of ongoing relationships of romantic partners examined how temporary and chronic deficits in self-control affect individuals' evaluations of other people. We suggest that when individuals lack self-control resources, they value such resources in other people. Our results support this hypothesis: We found that individuals low (but not high) in self-control use information about other people's self-control abilities when judging them, evaluating other people with high self-control more positively than those with low self-control.

Managing motivational conflict: how self-esteem and executive resources influence self-regulatory responses to risk.

This article explores how self-esteem and executive resources interact to determine responses to motivational conflict. One correlational and 3 experimental studies investigated the hypothesis that high and low self-esteem people undertake different self-regulatory strategies in "risky" situations that afford opportunity to pursue competing goals and that carrying out these strategies requires executive resources. When such resources are available, high self-esteem people respond to risk by prioritizing and pursuing approach goals, whereas low self-esteem people prioritize avoidance goals.

Divergent effects of activating thoughts of God on self-regulation.

Despite the cultural ubiquity of ideas and images related to God, relatively little is known about the effects of exposure to God representations on behavior. Specific depictions of God differ across religions, but common to most is that God is (a) an omnipotent, controlling force and (b) an omniscient, all-knowing being. Given these 2 characteristic features, how might exposure to the concept of God influence behavior? Leveraging classic and recent theorizing on self-regulation and social cognition, we predict and test for 2 divergent effects of exposure to notions of God on self-regulatory processes.

Vicarious goal satiation.

A signature feature of self-regulation is that once a goal is satiated, it becomes deactivated, thereby allowing people to engage in new pursuits. The present experiments provide evidence for , a novel phenomenon in which individuals experience "post-completion goal satiation" as a result of unwittingly taking on another person's goal pursuit and witnessing its completion. In Experiments 1 and 2, the observation of a goal being completed (vs.

The effects of self-regulatory strength, content, and strategies on close relationships.

This article reviews the growing literature on the effects of self-regulatory strength (how much self-regulatory ability people have), self-regulatory content (the goals toward which people self-regulate), and self-regulatory strategies (the manner in which people self-regulate) on close relationships. The extant literature indicates that close relationships benefit when relationship partners (a) have greater versus less self-regulatory strength, (b) prioritize relationship-promotion goals versus self-protection goals, (c) facilitate versus obstruct each other's personal goal pursuits, (d) enact positive relationship behaviors using approach versus avoidance strategies, and (e) pursue shared goals using complementary versus similar regulatory focus strategies. Future research could fruitfully (a) delve deeper into the influences of self-regulatory content and strategies on relationships and (b) integrate multiple lines of research examining the effects of self-regulation on relationships.

Outsourcing self-regulation.

Three studies demonstrate a novel phenomenon--self-regulatory outsourcing--in which thinking about how other people can be instrumental (i.e., helpful) for a given goal undermines motivation to expend effort on that goal.

Social disadvantage and the self-regulatory function of justice beliefs.

Five studies support the hypothesis that beliefs in societal fairness offer a self-regulatory benefit for members of socially disadvantaged groups. Specifically, members of disadvantaged groups are more likely than members of advantaged groups to calibrate their pursuit of long-term goals to their beliefs about societal fairness. In Study 1, low socioeconomic status (SES) undergraduate students who believed more strongly in societal fairness showed greater intentions to persist in the face of poor performance on a midterm examination.

In search of the silver lining: the justice motive fosters perceptions of benefits in the later lives of tragedy victims.

Past research has demonstrated that people's need to perceive the world as fair and just leads them to blame and derogate victims of tragedy. The research reported here shows that a positive reaction--bestowing additional meaning on the lives of individuals who have suffered--can also serve people's need to believe that the world is just. In two studies, participants whose justice motive was temporarily heightened or who strongly endorsed the belief that reward and punishment are fairly distributed in the world perceived more meaning and enjoyment in the life of someone who had experienced a tragedy than in the life of someone who had not experienced tragedy, but this pattern was not found for participants whose justice motive was not heightened or who did not strongly endorse a justice belief.

The regulatory function of self-esteem: testing the epistemic and acceptance signaling systems.

The authors draw on sociometer theory (e.g., Leary, 2004) and self-verification theory (e.

Shifting closeness: interpersonal effects of personal goal progress.

In this article, we examine how the shifting motivational priority of personal goals affects relationship closeness. We hypothesize that people will draw closer to significant others who are instrumental (vs. noninstrumental) for a goal that has not been progressing well-a goal that is thus high in motivational priority.

Confusing one instrumental other for another: goal effects on social categorization.

How do everyday goals shape the way people categorize others in the social environment? Research on social categorization has emphasized the role of feature-based categories such as race and gender, showing that people rely on such categories when perceiving and remembering others. We tested the hypothesis that social perception may depend on a new type of category--what we call "goal instrumentality," or the extent to which others are useful for an active goal. We demonstrate that people make more memory errors within the categories of "instrumental" and "noninstrumental," and fewer between-category errors, when a goal has been subtly activated.

Taking chances in the face of threat: romantic risk regulation and approach motivation.

Four studies examine the hypothesis that goals adopted by high and low self-esteem people (HSEs and LSEs) to manage risk in romantic relationships may reflect global shifts in approach motivation and subsequently affect risk taking in nonsocial domains. In Studies 1 and 2, threats to participants' romantic relationships heightened HSEs' self-reported general approach motivation while lowering LSEs' approach motivation. In Studies 2 through 4, HSEs exhibited riskier decision making (i.

How goal instrumentality shapes relationship evaluations.

Findings from 6 experiments support the hypothesis that relationship evaluations and behavioral tendencies are goal dependent, reflecting the instrumentality of significant others for the self's progress toward currently active goals. Experiments 1 and 3 found that active goals can automatically bring to mind significant others who are instrumental for the activated goal, heightening their accessibility relative to noninstrumental others. Experiments 2-5 found that active goals cause individuals to evaluate instrumental others more positively, draw closer to them, and approach them more readily, compared with noninstrumental others.

Automatic activation of attachment-related goals.

When people encounter threats, their attachment systems are activated and they become motivated to seek protection and support through proximity to their attachment figures. Theoretically, therefore, mental representations of attachment figures should be associated with goals related to attaining proximity and safety. The present studies explore this idea by examining the effects of a person's chronic attachment style and exposure to a particular attachment figure's name on the automatic activation of attachment-related goals.

Devaluation versus enhancement of attractive alternatives: a critical test using the calibration paradigm.

The calibration paradigm was used to test the competing hypotheses that (a) commitment motivates unduly negative evaluations of attractive alternatives (devaluation) versus (b) low commitment motivates exaggerated positive evaluations of attractive alternatives (enhancement). Single participants and dating participants low and high in relationship commitment were presented with an attractive, available person of the opposite sex and asked to judge the person's romantic appeal from their own perspective or from the perspective of their friends. Contrary to predictions based on the enhancement hypothesis, single and low-commitment participants did not provide higher ratings from their own perspective.