The Seed of Goal-Related Doubts: A Longitudinal Investigation of the Roles of Failure and Expectation of Success Among Police Trainee Applicants

Abstract

Various theories on personal goal striving rely on the assumption that failure raises doubts about the goal. Yet, empirical evidence for an association between objective failure experiences and doubts about personal long-term goals is still missing. In a longitudinal field study, applicants for a job as a police trainee (n = 172, Mage = 25.15; 55 females and 117 males) were accompanied across three measurement times over a period of five months. We investigated the effects of failure and initial expectation of success (in the standardized selection process) on doubts regarding the superordinate goal of becoming a police officer. As hypothesized, both failure and low initial expectation of success as well as their interaction led to increased goal-related doubts over time. The findings provide first empirical evidence for the role of failure in the emergence of goal-related doubts in personal long-term goals and, therefore, the disengagement process as it is hypothesized in various theories on goal striving and life-span development.

The dynamics of doubt: Short-term fluctuations and predictors of doubts in personal goal pursuit.

“…The present findings extend previous research by showing that doubts not only occur or dissolve after major failures (Bettschart et al, 2019) but also in reaction to mundane and frequent events in goal pursuit. The findings further reveal that individuals with higher (vs. lower) levels of action crisis experience more goal-related doubts during any activity.…”

“…Previous longitudinal studies examining the predictors of action crises have used a time frame of weeks or months. They found that individuals who experienced (vs. did not experience) failure in goal striving (Bettschart et al, 2019), appraised the attainability of their goal as being lower (vs. higher; Ghassemi et al, 2017), and had a more controlled (vs. autonomous) motivation for goal pursuit (Holding et al, 2017) experienced higher levels of action crisis. On an intraindividual level, a controlled motivation for goal pursuit (Holding et al, 2017) and appraisals of low goal attainability (but not goal desirability) predicted an increase in the action crisis (Ghassemi et al, 2017).…”

“…Although implausible in the light of theoretical considerations, it cannot be ruled out that the experience of doubts led people to report more negative and fewer positive goal-related events. To overcome this limitation, future studies need to find an ethically justifiable procedure for manipulating goal-related positive and negative events to test whether they cause doubts (for a quasi-experimental study linking objective failure and goal-related doubt on a between-subjects level, see Bettschart et al, 2019). A further advantage of such experimental designs would be that goal-related events would be constant across individuals.…”

How self-awareness is connected to less experience of action crises in personal goal pursuit

“…Given these negative consequences of experiencing an action crisis, it is important to identify possible antecedents. We start off with empirical evidence on the predictive power of goal-related difficulties for experiencing an action crisis (Bettschart et al, 2019 ; Ghassemi et al, 2017 , 2020 ). Specifically, we asked ourselves: Who is better in dealing with difficulties and thereby preventing action crises?…”

A General Architecture for Modeling the Dynamics of Goal-Directed Motivation and Decision-Making

“…Understanding the dynamics of goal pursuit also requires a longitudinal design in which observations of important process components (e.g., proximity to the goal and time to the deadline) can be made over time (Neal, Ballard, & Vancouver, 2017). However, the vast majority of research in this area has used either static, between-participant designs (Huang, Lin, & Zhang, 2019;Huang, Zhang, & Broniarczyk, 2012;Jia, Hirt, & Fishbach, 2019) or designs that incorporate only a small number of observations (e.g., five or fewer; Bettschart, Herrmann, Wolf, Brandstätter, & Healy, 2019;Lee, Sheldon, & Turban, 2003). Such designs are not well-suited for understanding the dynamics of goal pursuit because they tell us little about how the process plays out over time.…”