CHAPTER FIVE Motivation Resulting from Completed and Missing Actions

This chapter asks, when does motivation increase as a result of attending to accomplishments and when does it increase as a result of attending to their absence? We propose that attention to accomplishments increases motivation among uncommitted and inexperienced individuals by increasing their goal commitment. In contrast, attention to lack of accomplishments increases motivation among committed and experienced individuals by increasing their perceived need to make progress on a goal. We document parallel influences of attention to completed and missing actions on the pursuit of personal and shared goals, and document similarities between the types of information on completing versus missing actions that individuals include in the feedback they seek and give to each other and how they respond to this information. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, Volume 50 # 2014 Elsevier Inc. ISSN 0065-2601 All rights reserved. http://dx.doi. org/10.1016/B978-0-12-800284-1.00005-9 257 There are many goals a person wishes to fulfill: long-term aspirations and short-term desires, ambitions that define a person’s identity and secondary wishes, and objectives people pursue on their own and those they pursue as part of a group. All these various aspirations, desires, ambitions, and objectives form “goals,” namely, desired states that guide cognition and action (Aarts & Dijksterhuis, 2000; Chartrand and Bargh, 1996; Fishbach & Ferguson, 2007; Kruglanski et al., 2002). Most often, goals operate simultaneously in different configurations: goals can compete, complement, override, and be overridden, depending on the circumstances (Bargh, Gollwitzer, Lee-Chai, Barndollar & Trotschel, 2001; Higgins, 1997; Locke & Latham, 1990; Shah, Friedman, & Kruglanski, 2002). When pursuing goals simultaneously, prioritization is a primary challenge: deciding which goals to attend to and howmuch to invest in each of them in the present (Fitzsimons & Fishbach, 2010). Determining the priority of a goal is a unique mental task that differs from deciding whether to adopt a goal in the first place or from deciding its relative importance and, hence, its position in a personal goal hierarchy. Prioritization refers to a present pursuit of goals that were adopted and that can vary by importance. For example, a person who has decided to acquire a new skill needs to decide whether to invest personal resources in this goal in the present and, if so, how much. Prioritization relies on consideration of how much one has done as well as how much one has left undone. Indeed, people monitor their goals by attending to either what they have accomplished to date or what is still missing. For example, people may consider recent healthy choices, career achievements, or the opening of a savings account (completing actions), and these actions in turn will influence the present priority of health, career, and financial goals. Alternatively, people can consider what is still missing to improve their health, how far they are from their desired position or career, and how much they need to save to meet their financial goals (missing actions), which again provide input for present prioritization. This chapter seeks to provide a theoretical framework for when either of these twoways of monitoring goals—focusing onwhat has been done versus left undone—is more effective at increasing motivational priority (which, for sake of brevity, we will mainly refer to as “motivation”). In particular, we explore what aspects of the meaning of actions and what characteristics of the pursuers determine whether motivation is stronger after attending to completed versus missing actions. Our investigation includes goals of different degrees of abstraction. Abstract goals are associated with subgoals, which are concrete actions 258 Ayelet Fishbach et al.