Goals, Plans, and Action Models
Authors: Meyer Janet R. 
Published: August 2021

The messages spoken in everyday conversation are influenced by participants’ goals. Interpersonal scholars have distinguished two types of goals thought to influence the wording of a message: instrumental goals (primary goals) and secondary goals. An instrumental goal is related to a speaker’s primary reason for designing the message. Instrumental goals would include goals such as to ask for a favor, seek information, apologize, give advice, or change the other person’s opinion. Secondary goals pertain to more general concerns. They include goals such as to manage one’s impression, avoid offending the hearer, and act consistently with one’s values. The ability to design a message that pursues an instrumental goal effectively while also addressing (or at least not conflicting with) relevant secondary goals is associated with greater communication competence. Considerable research has sought to explain differences in the ability to design messages that effectively address multiple goals. One such factor appears to be the extent to which a speaker can adapt the language of a message to the communication-relevant features of a specific situation or hearer. If a speaker’s primary goal is to seek a favor, relevant situation features may include the speaker’s right to ask, expected resistance, and qualities of the speaker–hearer relationship. A second behavior associated with the ability to produce multiple-goal messages is suggested by research on cognitive editing. The latter research indicates that the likelihood of producing a message that addresses relevant secondary goals will sometimes depend upon whether a speaker becomes aware, prior to speaking, that a planned message could have an unwanted outcome (e.g., the message may offend the hearer). When such outcomes are anticipated in advance, the message may be left unspoken or edited prior to speaking.

The ability to produce a message that achieves a speaker’s goals may also depend on the type of planning that precedes the design of a message. The plan-based theory of strategic communication views plans as hierarchical structures that specify goals and actions at different levels of specificity. The theory holds that a person pursuing a goal first tries to retrieve from memory a preexisting plan that could be modified for the current situation. When that is not possible, speakers must formulate a novel plan. Research employing indicants of fluency suggests that formulating a novel plan (which requires changes at a higher, more abstract level of a plan) makes heavier demands on limited capacity than does modifying an existing plan at a lower level of the hierarchy (e.g., speaking more slowly). Insight into how persons plan what to say has also come from research on imagined interactions, conflict management, anticipating obstacles to compliance, and verbal disagreement tasks. In an effort to better understand the design of messages in interpersonal settings, a number of scholars have proposed models of the cognitive processes and structures thought to be involved in designing, editing, and producing such messages. Action models of this sort, which generate testable hypotheses, draw from work in artificial intelligence, cognitive models of language production, and research on social cognition. Three such models are action assembly theory, the cognitive rules model, and the implicit rules model.