Mistaking an Intention for a Behavior: The Case of Enacting Behavioral Decisions Versus Simply Intending to Enact Them.

Five experiments investigated a previously unrecognized phenomenon-remembering that one enacted a mundane behavioral decision when one only intended to do so-and its psychological mechanisms. The theoretical conceptualization advanced in this research proposes that this error stems from a misattribution when an intention and a behavior are similar. Intentions and behaviors are similar when the physical aspects of the behavior resemble the intention (e.

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.

The cooperation link: Power and context moderate verbal mimicry.

Drawing on theories of mimicry as a schema-driven process, we tested whether the degree of verbal mimicry is dependent on the congruence between interactants' power dynamic (symmetric versus asymmetric), task type (cooperative versus competitive), and interaction context (negotiation versus social). Experiment 1 found higher verbal mimicry among dyads who successfully completed a cooperative problem-solving task compared with those who did not, but only under conditions of symmetric, not asymmetric, power. Experiment 2 had dyads complete either a cooperative or a competitive negotiation task, under conditions of symmetric versus asymmetric power.

Action Dominance: The Performance Effects of Multiple Action Demands and the Benefits of an Inaction Focus.

Four experiments uncovered an action dominance error by which people's natural focus on actions hinders appropriate responses to social and nonsocial stimuli. This surprising error comprises higher rates of both omission (misses) and commission (false alarms) when, in responding to action and inaction demands, people have higher numbers of action targets. The action dominance error was verified over four experiments using an analog that required responses to words and to target individuals.

People watching: The perception of the relative body proportions of the self and others.

We have an abundance of perceptual information from multiple modalities specifying our body proportions. Consequently, it seems reasonable for researchers to assume that we have an accurate perception of our body proportions. In contrast to this intuition, recent research has shown large, striking distortions in people's perceptions of the relative proportions of their own bodies.

The perceptual homunculus: the perception of the relative proportions of the human body.

Given that observing one's body is ubiquitous in experience, it is natural to assume that people accurately perceive the relative sizes of their body parts. This assumption is mistaken. In a series of studies, we show that there are dramatic systematic distortions in the perception of bodily proportions, as assessed by visual estimation tasks, where participants were asked to compare the lengths of two body parts.

Being Active and Impulsive: The Role of Goals for Action and Inaction in Self-Control.

Although self-control often requires behavioral inaction (i.e., a piece of cake), the process of inhibiting impulsive behavior is commonly characterized as cognitively active (i.

Naïve Definitions of Action and Inaction: The Continuum, Spread, and Valence of Behaviors.

The cohesiveness of a society depends, in part, on how its individual members manage their daily activities with respect to the goals of that society. Hence, there should be a degree of social agreement on what constitutes action and what constitutes inaction. The present research investigated the structure of action and inaction definitions, the evaluation of action versus inaction, and individual differences in these evaluations.

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.

Implicit working memory.

Working Memory (WM) plays a crucial role in many high-level cognitive processes (e.g., reasoning, decision making, goal pursuit and cognitive control).

Strategic automation of emotion regulation.

As implementation intentions are a powerful self-regulation tool for thought and action (meta-analysis by P. M. Gollwitzer & P.

Increasing and decreasing motor and cognitive output: a model of general action and inaction goals.

General action and inaction goals can influence the amount of motor or cognitive output irrespective of the type of behavior in question, with the same stimuli producing trivial and important motor and cognitive manifestations normally viewed as parts of different systems. A series of experiments examined the effects of instilling general action and inaction goals using word primes, such as "action" and "rest." The first 5 experiments showed that the same stimuli influenced motor output, such as doodling on a piece of paper and eating, as well as cognitive output, such as recall and problem solving.

Associating versus proposing or associating what we propose: comment on Gawronski and Bodenhausen (2006).

This commentary highlights the strengths of the associative-propositional evaluation model. It then describes problems in proposing a qualitative separation between propositional and associative processes. Propositional processes are instead described as associative.