Goals

Abstract

Goals, which MeSH classifies under motivation, are the ends people commit themselves to pursuing, from a work target to a personal project. This article covers goal-setting theory and its meta-analytic record, the feedback-loop view of goal pursuit, kinds of goals (achievement goals, goal content and self-concordance), the gap between intending and acting and the planning strategies that narrow it, nonconscious goal pursuit, and goal conflict, disengagement and the side effects of goal setting. The central question is when setting a goal helps: in the meta-analyses cited here the average benefit ranges from small, for individual behavior change, to considerable, for specific difficult group goals, and is larger for difficult and public goals, while critics argue that the harms of goal setting have been largely ignored.

Keywords: goals, goal setting, goal pursuit, implementation intentions, self-regulation

Personal goals are ubiquitous in everyday life, and people typically pursue multiple personal goals at any given time (Milyavskaya & Werner, 2018). Self-regulation is a core aspect of human functioning that helps facilitate the successful pursuit of those goals (Inzlicht et al., 2021).

What Goals Are

In self-regulation research a goal is a desired state against which a current state is compared: to self-regulate, a person compares their current state with a personally desired state, and a detected discrepancy motivates behavior that reduces it (Epton et al., 2017); monitoring goal progress likewise serves to identify discrepancies between the current state and the desired state (Harkin et al., 2016). Psychology has used many goal constructs, which have been reviewed in terms of their structure, process and content (Austin & Vancouver, 1996). A growing body of research shows that goals are best conceptualized as a distinct unit of analysis, with extensive within-person variations in both goal characteristics and attainment (Milyavskaya & Werner, 2018).

Goals belong to the incentive tradition in motivation. Motivation was once thought of in terms of aversive drives, and drive concepts were largely replaced by incentive concepts (Berridge, 2018). One incentive framework proposed that while an incentive is behaviorally salient an organism is especially responsive to incentive-related cues, and described this sustained sensitivity as a continuing state, a current concern, with a definite onset in commitment and an offset in consummation or disengagement (Klinger, 1975).

Goals also have a neural account. One theory proposes that cognitive control, the ability to orchestrate thought and action in accordance with internal goals, stems from the active maintenance of patterns of activity in the prefrontal cortex that represent goals and the means to achieve them (Miller & Cohen, 2001).

MeSH files goals as a narrower descriptor of motivation and lists no narrower descriptors beneath it.

Goal-Setting Theory

Goal-setting theory comes from organizational psychology. Locke's 1968 paper worked toward a theory of task motivation and incentives (Locke, 1968), and Locke and Latham later published the monograph A Theory of Goal Setting and Task Performance (Locke & Latham, 1990). A summary of 35 years of empirical research described the theory's core findings, the mechanisms by which goals operate, moderators of goal effects, the relation of goals and satisfaction, the role of goals as mediators of incentives, and the theory's limitations (Locke & Latham, 2002), and the same authors later published a half-century retrospective on its development (Locke & Latham, 2019).

Even critics of goal setting accept its core finding: hundreds of studies conducted in numerous countries and contexts have consistently demonstrated that setting specific, challenging goals can powerfully drive behavior and boost performance (Ordóñez et al., 2009).

Meta-analyses put sizes on the effect. Across randomized controlled trials yielding 384 effect sizes from 141 papers (N = 16,523), goal setting had a small positive unique effect across a range of behaviors, d = .34, and was particularly effective if the goal was difficult, set publicly and a group goal; the Egger test showed skewness, but the effect remained significant (d = .38) among studies meeting a 55% power threshold (Epton et al., 2017). For groups, specific difficult goals yielded considerably higher group performance than nonspecific goals (d = 0.80, k = 23 effect sizes); moderately difficult and easy goals also brought benefits relative to nonspecific goals, but smaller ones, and the overall effect of group goals was d = 0.56 (k = 49) (Kleingeld et al., 2011).

Individual goals inside interdependent groups depended on their focus. Egocentric individual goals, aimed at maximizing individual performance, had a particularly negative group-performance effect (d = -1.75, k = 6), whereas groupcentric goals, aimed at maximizing the individual contribution to the group's performance, showed a positive effect (d = 1.20, k = 4) (Kleingeld et al., 2011).

Goal Structure and Self-Regulation

Goals regulate behavior through feedback. Control theory provides a model of self-regulation whose basic construct is the discrepancy-reducing feedback loop, and it has been applied to personality-social, clinical and health psychology (Carver & Scheier, 1982). The account is disputed from within goal-setting research: a sociocognitive theory of self-regulation contrasts itself with the focus of control theory on discrepancy reduction, positing proactive discrepancy production, by adopting goal challenges, working in concert with reactive discrepancy reduction in realizing them, and its authors argue that the evidence on self-efficacy and goal setting contradicts findings that belief in one's capabilities and personal goals is self-debilitating (Bandura & Locke, 2003). The findings in question came from control theory: in a within-person procedure with 56 undergraduates, self-efficacy negatively influenced subsequent performance and personal goals were negatively related to subsequent performance, although in a second study of 185 undergraduates manipulated goal level positively predicted performance and self-efficacy positively predicted performance in the difficult-goal condition (Vancouver et al., 2001). A later meta-analysis of the within-person relationship found a corrected self-efficacy/performance correlation of .23 that was weak and nonsignificant (ρ = .06) when controlling for the linear trajectory, and concluded that self-efficacy is primarily a product of past performance rather than the driving force affecting future performance (Sitzmann & Yeo, 2013).

Feedback requires monitoring. Control theory and other frameworks suggest that monitoring goal progress is a crucial process that intervenes between setting and attaining a goal (Harkin et al., 2016). Across 138 studies (N = 19,951) that randomly allocated participants to an intervention designed to promote monitoring of goal progress or to a control condition, interventions increased the frequency of monitoring goal progress (d+ = 1.98) and promoted goal attainment (d+ = 0.40; d+ = 0.19 after trim-and-fill adjustment, the authors judging the influence of publication bias modest rather than severe); changes in the frequency of monitoring mediated the effect on attainment, and effects on attainment were larger when outcomes were reported or made public and when the information was physically recorded (Harkin et al., 2016).

Goals rarely stand alone. They have been analyzed as systems, in a theory of goal systems (Kruglanski et al., 2002), and progress on one goal can shift choices toward others: in four studies, progress along one goal liberated people to pursue inconsistent goals, and merely planning to make goal progress in the future may facilitate incongruent choice of immediate action (Fishbach & Dhar, 2005).

Figure 1

Average Effect Sizes in Four Meta-Analyses of Goal Setting and Goal Pursuit

Kinds of Goals

Goals differ in what they aim at. In a social-cognitive model of motivation and personality, people's implicit theories orient them toward particular goals, and these goals set up two major patterns of behavior, the adaptive mastery-oriented pattern and the maladaptive helpless pattern (Dweck & Leggett, 1988).

Achievement goals have since been split by valence. Departing from the dichotomy of performance goals versus mastery goals, one framework partitioned the performance goal orientation into independent approach and avoidance orientations, and in two experiments only performance goals grounded in the avoidance of failure undermined intrinsic motivation (Elliot & Harackiewicz, 1996). A 2 × 2 achievement goal framework comprising mastery-approach, mastery-avoidance, performance-approach and performance-avoidance goals was proposed and tested in three studies; factor analyses supported the independence of the four goals, and the pattern for mastery-avoidance goals was more negative than that for mastery-approach goals and more positive than that for performance-avoidance goals (Elliot & McGregor, 2001).

Goals also differ in why they are pursued. Self-determination theory maintains that understanding human motivation requires a consideration of innate psychological needs for competence, autonomy and relatedness, and hypothesizes that different regulatory processes underlying goal pursuits and different goal contents relate differently to effective functioning and well-being, because they are associated with differing degrees of need satisfaction (Deci & Ryan, 2000).

The fit between a goal and the person matters. In the self-concordance model, people pursuing goals consistent with their developing interests and core values put more sustained effort into those goals and are more likely to attain them, and attaining such goals brings greater well-being, an effect mediated by daily experiences of autonomy, competence and relatedness; the model fit three longitudinal data sets (Sheldon & Elliot, 1999).

From Intention to Action

Setting a goal is not the same as acting on it. People do not always do the things that they intend to do, a shortfall known as the intention-behavior gap (Sheeran & Webb, 2016). Yet intentions matter: as studies based on the theory of planned behavior demonstrate, strong intentions are reliably realized more often than weak intentions (Gollwitzer, 1999).

Planning can close part of the gap. When people encounter problems in translating their goals into action, such as failing to get started, becoming distracted or falling into bad habits, they may strategically call on automatic processes through implementation intentions, plans that link anticipated critical situations to goal-directed responses ('Whenever situation x arises, I will initiate the goal-directed response y!'); implementation intentions delegate the control of goal-directed responses to anticipated situational cues, which elicit these responses automatically when encountered, and a program of research demonstrates that they further the attainment of goals (Gollwitzer, 1999). Their effects and processes have been meta-analyzed (Gollwitzer & Sheeran, 2006).

How a goal is imagined also matters. Positive thinking can be detrimental to effort and success if it comes in the form of fantasies about the desired future rather than beliefs, that is, expectations; fantasy realization theory holds that mentally contrasting the future with reality produces active goal pursuit when expectations of success are high and active goal disengagement when they are low (Oettingen, 2012). Combining the two strategies, a meta-analysis of mental contrasting with implementation intentions (MCII) across 21 studies (24 effect sizes; 15,907 participants) found a small to medium effect on goal attainment (g = 0.336), stronger for interventions based on interactions between participants and experimenters (g = 0.465) than for those based on interactions between participants and documents (g = 0.277); because of some publication bias, the actual effect sizes may be smaller (Wang et al., 2021).

Goals need not be conscious. In five experiments, the goal to perform well or to cooperate was activated without participants' awareness through a priming manipulation; priming the goal to perform well improved performance on an intellectual task, priming the goal to cooperate made participants replenish a commonly held resource more readily, and action guided by these nonconsciously activated goals showed two classic content-free features of the pursuit of consciously held goals (Bargh et al., 2001). The finding is contested. Two direct replication attempts of the high-performance-goal priming effect found no effect of priming, the first with means in the opposite direction from those originally reported, and the authors concluded that the literature on goal priming requires some skeptical scrutiny (Harris et al., 2013). A meta-analysis of 352 effect sizes from 133 studies in which word primes were incidentally presented found a small behavioral priming effect (dRE = 0.352), only minimally biased by the publication of positive results, with stronger effects for more valued behavior or goal concepts (Weingarten et al., 2016).

Goal Conflict and Disengagement

Goals compete. Consumer choices are often driven by multiple goals, such as career and family, each of which if viewed in isolation may appear to suggest conflicting choices (Fishbach & Dhar, 2005).

Giving up a goal has a course of its own. In one framework, disengagement follows frustration and involves an incentive-disengagement cycle of invigoration, aggression, depression and recovery, so that depression is a normal part of disengagement that may be either adaptive or maladaptive for the individual (Klinger, 1975). Disengagement can also be healthy: in three studies, including one of parents of children with cancer and parents of medically healthy children, goal disengagement and goal reengagement in alternative goals could be associated with high subjective well-being, and the two had interactive effects on well-being (Wrosch et al., 2003).

Goal setting has critics. One review argues that the beneficial effects of goal setting have been overstated and that systematic harm caused by goal setting has been largely ignored, and identifies side effects including a narrow focus that neglects nongoal areas, distorted risk preferences, a rise in unethical behavior, inhibited learning, corrosion of organizational culture and reduced intrinsic motivation (Ordóñez et al., 2009). Locke and Latham replied that the critique breached the principles of good scholarship by drawing its central theme from anecdotal evidence, and that almost all the pitfalls of goal setting it cites had already been published by them (Locke & Latham, 2009); their earlier review also describes moderators of goal effects and the theory's limitations (Locke & Latham, 2002).

Worked Example

The MCII meta-analysis lends itself to a direct comparison. Interventions delivered through interaction with experimenters had g = 0.465, and those delivered through documents g = 0.277 (Wang et al., 2021). The difference is 0.465 − 0.277 = 0.188, and the ratio is 0.465 / 0.277 ≈ 1.68, so in that meta-analysis's moderator analysis, which excluded two large studies of online document interventions, the experimenter format's average effect was about two-thirds larger than the document format's, and because of some publication bias the actual effect sizes may be smaller.

Discussion

Three conclusions follow for cognitive psychology. First, in two of the meta-analyses cited here goal setting and progress monitoring help on average, but modestly: the unique effect of goal setting on behavior change was d = .34 (Epton et al., 2017), and progress monitoring promoted goal attainment at d+ = 0.40 (Harkin et al., 2016).

Second, the kind of goal matters. Goal setting was particularly effective when the goal was difficult and set publicly (Epton et al., 2017), self-concordant goals drew more sustained effort (Sheldon & Elliot, 1999), and egocentric individual goals in interdependent groups had a particularly negative group-performance effect (Kleingeld et al., 2011).

Third, goals have costs. Critics list side effects of goal setting including unethical behavior and reduced intrinsic motivation (Ordóñez et al., 2009), and goal disengagement and reengagement in alternative goals could be associated with high subjective well-being (Wrosch et al., 2003).

Current Directions

Three lines of work are active. Integration: a review of models of self-regulation from social psychology, personality psychology and cognitive neuroscience integrates them on four key elements, level of analysis, conflict, emotion and cognitive functioning (Inzlicht et al., 2021). Open questions: a review of personal goals highlights the many aspects of personal goal pursuit that are still poorly understood (Milyavskaya & Werner, 2018). Moderators and settings: additional studies are needed to determine the role of moderator variables in MCII (Wang et al., 2021), and group goal-setting research shows a striking lack of recent field studies in organizational settings (Kleingeld et al., 2011).

Common Misconceptions

“Good intentions make no difference.”

Strong intentions are reliably realized more often than weak intentions (Gollwitzer, 1999), although people do not always do what they intend (Sheeran & Webb, 2016).

“Any goal improves performance.”

In interdependent groups, egocentric individual goals had a particularly negative effect on group performance (Kleingeld et al., 2011).

“Giving up on a goal is always a failure.”

Goal disengagement and reengagement in alternative goals could be associated with high subjective well-being (Wrosch et al., 2003).

“Goals only work when they are conscious.”

In five experiments, goals activated without participants' awareness guided action (Bargh et al., 2001), although two direct replication attempts of a goal-priming effect found no effect (Harris et al., 2013).

Glossary

Achievement goals.

Goals pursued in achievement settings, divided in the 2 × 2 framework into mastery-approach, mastery-avoidance, performance-approach and performance-avoidance goals.

Control theory.

A model of self-regulation built on the discrepancy-reducing feedback loop.

Current concern.

A continuing state of sensitivity to an incentive, beginning with commitment and ending with consummation or disengagement.

Fantasy realization theory.

A theory of how fantasies about a desired future can be used to self-regulate goal pursuit through mental contrasting.

Goal disengagement.

Abandoning a goal, studied for unattainable goals and their effects on well-being.

Goal reengagement.

Taking up alternative goals after abandoning an unattainable one.

Goal setting.

Adopting a specific goal, such as a difficult target, to direct behavior.

Implementation intention.

A plan that links an anticipated critical situation to a goal-directed response.

Intention-behavior gap.

The shortfall between what people intend to do and what they do.

Mental contrasting.

Contrasting a desired future with present reality, which leads to goal pursuit or disengagement depending on expectations of success.

Nonconscious goal pursuit.

Pursuit of a goal activated outside awareness, for example by priming.

Progress monitoring.

Checking progress toward a goal, a process that intervenes between setting and attaining it.

Self-concordance.

The consistency of a goal with a person's developing interests and core values.

Self-determination theory.

A theory of motivation built on innate needs for competence, autonomy and relatedness.

Self-regulation.

A core aspect of human functioning that helps facilitate the successful pursuit of personal goals.

Key Researchers

John A. Bargh

. Social psychologist at Yale University (emeritus); reported five experiments in which behavioral goals activated outside awareness guided action. ORCID - Wikipedia - Faculty Page - Google Scholar - Wikidata

Charles S. Carver

(1947-2019). Psychologist at the University of Miami; with Scheier, presented the discrepancy-reducing feedback loop of control theory as a model of self-regulation. ORCID - Faculty Page - Google Scholar - Wikidata

Edward L. Deci

(1942-2026). Psychologist at the University of Rochester; co-founded self-determination theory and its account of the what and why of goal pursuits. ORCID - Wikipedia - Google Scholar - Wikidata

Carol S. Dweck

. Psychologist at Stanford University; co-authored the social-cognitive model in which implicit theories orient people toward particular goals. ORCID - Wikipedia - Faculty Page - Google Scholar - Wikidata

Andrew J. Elliot

. Psychologist at the University of Rochester; proposed the 2 × 2 achievement goal framework and co-authored the self-concordance model. ORCID - Wikipedia - Faculty Page - Google Scholar - Wikidata

Peter M. Gollwitzer

. Psychologist at New York University and the University of Konstanz; introduced implementation intentions. ORCID - Wikipedia - Faculty Page - Google Scholar

Gary P. Latham

. Organizational psychologist at the University of Toronto; co-authored the 35-year and half-century summaries of goal-setting theory. ORCID - Faculty Page

Edwin A. Locke

. Organizational psychologist at the University of Maryland; worked toward a theory of task motivation and incentives in 1968 and co-developed goal-setting theory. Wikipedia - Faculty Page - Google Scholar - Wikidata

Richard M. Ryan

. Psychologist at Australian Catholic University and professor emeritus at the University of Rochester; co-founded self-determination theory. ORCID - Wikipedia - Faculty Page - Google Scholar - Wikidata

Michael F. Scheier

. Psychologist and professor emeritus at Carnegie Mellon University; co-authored the control-theory model of self-regulation and a study of goal disengagement and reengagement. Faculty Page - Google Scholar - Wikidata

Paschal Sheeran

. Psychologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; co-authored the meta-analysis of implementation intentions, the review of the intention-behavior gap and the meta-analysis of progress monitoring. ORCID - Faculty Page - Google Scholar

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a goal in psychology?

Goals are treated as a distinct unit of analysis, and people typically pursue multiple personal goals at any given time (Milyavskaya & Werner, 2018).

Does setting goals improve performance?

A meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials found a small positive unique effect of goal setting on behavior change, d = .34 (Epton et al., 2017), and specific difficult group goals yielded considerably higher group performance than nonspecific goals (Kleingeld et al., 2011).

What are implementation intentions?

They are plans that link anticipated critical situations to goal-directed responses, so that the anticipated situational cues, when actually encountered, elicit these responses automatically (Gollwitzer, 1999).

Why do intentions not always turn into action?

People do not always do the things that they intend to do (Sheeran & Webb, 2016), and they can fail to get started, become distracted or fall into bad habits (Gollwitzer, 1999).

Does tracking progress toward a goal help?

Interventions that increased monitoring of goal progress promoted goal attainment, particularly when outcomes were reported or made public or physically recorded (Harkin et al., 2016).

Can goals operate unconsciously?

In five experiments, goals activated without participants' awareness guided performance and cooperation (Bargh et al., 2001), but two direct replication attempts of the high-performance-goal priming effect found no effect (Harris et al., 2013), and a meta-analysis of word priming found a small behavioral effect (Weingarten et al., 2016).

Can goal setting backfire?

Critics identify side effects including a narrow focus, distorted risk preferences, unethical behavior, inhibited learning and reduced intrinsic motivation (Ordóñez et al., 2009); the theory's originators replied that almost all of these pitfalls had already been published by them (Locke & Latham, 2009).

Is it healthy to give up on a goal?

Abandoning unattainable goals and reengaging in alternative goals could be associated with high subjective well-being (Wrosch et al., 2003).

References