No abstract

The present research explored the nature of automatic associations formed between short-term motives (temptations) and the overriding goals with which they interfere. Five experimental studies, encompassing several self-regulatory domains, found that temptations tend to activate such higher priority goals, whereas the latter tend to inhibit the temptations. These activation patterns occurred outside of participants' conscious awareness and did not appear to tax their mental resources. Moreover, they varied as a function of subjective goal importance and were more pronounced for successful versus unsuccessful self-regulators in a given domain. Finally, priming by temptation stimuli was found not only to influence the activation of overriding goals but also to affect goal-congruent behavioral choices.

Consumer choices are often driven by multiple goals (e.g., career and family), each of which if viewed in isolation may appear to suggest conflicting choices. This article examines the effect of initial goal pursuit on consumers' interest in pursuing unrelated or even conflicting goals. Four studies were conducted to test whether perceived goal progress hinders the pursuit of the focal goal. These studies demonstrate that in the course of self-regulation progress along one goal liberates people to pursue inconsistent goals. Furthermore, merely planning to make goal progress in the future may facilitate incongruent choice of immediate action. (c) 2005 by JOURNAL OF CONSUMER RESEARCH, Inc..

How do anticipated short-term costs affect the likelihood of engaging in an activity that has long-term benefits. Five studies investigated the factors that determine (a) how anticipated short-term costs elicit self-control efforts and (b) how self-control efforts eventually diminish the influence of short-term costs on behavior. The studies manipulated short-term costs (e.g., painful medical procedures) and assessed a variety of self-control strategies (e.g., self-imposed penalties for failure to undergo a test). The results show that short-term costs elicit self-control strategies for self rather than others, before rather than after behavior, when long-term benefits are important rather than unimportant and when the costs are moderate rather than extremely small or large. The results also show that the self-control efforts help people act according to their long-term interests.People sometimes know what they prefer but feel uncertain that this is what they will actually do. This uncertainty often reflects feasibility constraints such as lack of opportunity, freedom of choice, or prerequisite skills. In some cases, however, people may know that what they prefer is entirely feasible but may nevertheless suspect that when faced with the actual choice they will be tempted to do something else. A considerable amount of basic and applied research on self-control has investigated how immediate temptations prevent people from acting according to their preferences and has suggested techniques that may help people resist the temptations (Baumeister, Heatherton, & Tice, 1994;Gollwitzer & Moskowitz, 1996;Kuhl, 1984;Loewenstein, 1996;Mischel, Cantor, & Feldman, 1996;Rachlin, 1995;Thaler, 1994;Wegner, 1994). On the basis of this work, the present article examines the antecedents and consequences of self-control designed to counteract the influence of anticipated temptations on behavior. In this article, we seek to extend earlier research by investigating the factors that determine (a) how anticipated temptations elicit counteractive self-control and (b) whether counteractive self-control actually diminishes the influence of temptations on behavior. Counteractive ControlTo understand self-control when future choice is anticipated, it may be useful to distinguish between perceived short-term and Yaacov Trope,

The authors find that experimental studies using online samples (e.g., MTurk) often violate the assumption of random assignment, because participant attrition-quitting a study before completing it and getting paid-is not only prevalent, but also varies systemically across experimental conditions. Using standard social psychology paradigms (e.g., ego-depletion, construal level), they observed attrition rates ranging from 30% to 50% (Study 1). The authors show that failing to attend to attrition rates in online panels has grave consequences. By introducing experimental confounds, unattended attrition misled them to draw mind-boggling yet false conclusions: that recalling a few happy events is considerably more effortful than recalling many happy events, and that imagining applying eyeliner leads to weight loss (Study 2). In addition, attrition rate misled them to draw a logical yet false conclusion: that explaining one's view on gun rights decreases progun sentiment (Study 3). The authors offer a partial remedy (Study 4) and call for minimizing and reporting experimental attrition in studies conducted on the Web. (PsycINFO Database Record