Our important personal goals has long been thought to have a significant impact on our everyday subjective experiences and general well-being and therefore it is of particular importance to consider the factors that affect how easily these goals come to mind, and how readily we pursue them. In addressing this question, psychologists have traditionally focused the motivational contents of goals, examining,for instance, the general regulatory needs that may bring particular goals to mind. Yet,goals are also knowledge constructs and, as such, should follow the same principles of organization and activation as articulated for knowledge constructs generally. Indeed, recent research has suggested that goals may be primed by semantically similar constructs in one's environment and that such priming has implications for behavior and subjective experiences. Yet because goals have a regulatory function, they are often associated with specific behaviors or actions designed to bring about their attainment and these associations may also play an important role in determining what goals come to mind and how singularly they are pursued. In particular, engaging in an activity that has previously been associated with a specific goal may automatically bring this former goal to mind, even in situations in which the behavior was initiated to fulfill a different goal. The proposed research, then, is designed to increase understanding of this """"""""bottom-up"""""""" activation and its implications for promoting goal pursuit. Such bottom-up activation may be found to depend not on goals' semantic relation to means, but rather on the degree to which the means is thought to facilitate goal attainment. Participants' use of behaviors, objects and other individuals to achieve specific goals will be manipulated in order to examine whether these means will bring the original goal to mind in an entirely different context. The results of the proposed studies will have implications for our understanding of how individuals initiate and maintain goal pursuits and how these pursuits influence our emotional experiences and general well-being.
| Shah, James Y; Kruglanski, Arie W (2003) When opportunity knocks: bottom-up priming of goals by means and its effects on self-regulation. J Pers Soc Psychol 84:1109-22 |
| Shah, James (2003) The motivational looking glass: how significant others implicitly affect goal appraisals. J Pers Soc Psychol 85:424-39 |
| Shah, James (2003) Automatic for the people: how representations of significant others implicitly affect goal pursuit. J Pers Soc Psychol 84:661-81 |
