Adherence to Personal Resolutions Across Time, Culture, and Goal Domains.

Goal setting is only somewhat more common than the failure to follow through on one's goals. Recognizing the challenge of long-term behavior change, we asked what best predicts long-term goal adherence: extrinsic motivation (the extent to which goal pursuit is experienced as a means to an end) or intrinsic motivation (the extent to which the same goal pursuit is experienced as an end in itself). In a year-long longitudinal study, U.

Goal harmony.

At times, goals seem to conflict, pulling people in opposite directions; at other times, they appear to complement or even facilitate one another, creating harmony. We propose and test a theoretical framework for understanding the antecedents and consequences of perceived goal harmony. We find that goal harmony can be enhanced through the cognitive process of mental integration, which includes identifying connections between goals (e.

How can we make sound replication decisions?

Replication and the reported crises impacting many fields of research have become a focal point for the sciences. This has led to reforms in publishing, methodological design and reporting, and increased numbers of experimental replications coordinated across many laboratories. While replication is rightly considered an indispensable tool of science, financial resources and researchers' time are quite limited.

The present and future of peer review: Ideas, interventions, and evidence.

What is wrong with the peer review system? Is peer review sustainable? Useful? What other models exist? These are central yet contentious questions in today's academic discourse. This perspective critically discusses alternative models and revisions to the peer review system. The authors highlight possible changes to the peer review system, with the goal of fostering further dialog among the main stakeholders, including producers and consumers of scientific research.

The misalignment of incentives in academic publishing and implications for journal reform.

For most researchers, academic publishing serves two goals that are often misaligned-knowledge dissemination and establishing scientific credentials. While both goals can encourage research with significant depth and scope, the latter can also pressure scholars to maximize publication metrics. Commercial publishing companies have capitalized on the centrality of publishing to the scientific enterprises of knowledge dissemination and academic recognition to extract large profits from academia by leveraging unpaid services from reviewers, creating financial barriers to research dissemination, and imposing substantial fees for open access.

The bigger the problem the littler: When the scope of a problem makes it seem less dangerous.

Across 15 studies ( = 2,636), people who considered the prevalence of a problem (e.g., 4.

What do highly motivated people know? Balancing goals, prioritizing actions.

Highly motivated individuals are healthier, more academically and professionally successful, and have stronger relationships. What sets these individuals apart? We propose that highly motivated individuals know when to balance versus prioritize goals. Specifically, they seek harmony between their multiple goals: they see these goals as advancing or complementing each other (e.

Thinking of food: The mental representation of healthy foods as unprepared.

We find that people implicitly and explicitly represent healthy foods they categorize as healthy in their purest, least prepared forms but represent foods they categorize as unhealthy in their most prepared forms (e.g., a veggie patty is represented as frozen while a beef burger is represented in a bun with melted cheese and ready to eat).

Can't wait to pay: The desire for goal closure increases impatience for costs.

[Correction Notice: An Erratum for this article was reported online in on Jul 08 2024 (see record 2024-99966-001). The article is being made available open access under the CC-BY-ND-NC license. The correct copyright is "© 2023 The Author(s).

Intuitive advertisers: Emotionality in communication about unhealthy food.

Objective: This research tests whether people use more emotion-based language when communicating with one another about unhealthy foods than healthy foods. This matters because emotion-based language is more persuasive.

Method: In three observational studies, we analyzed the emotionality in 1,000 online recipe descriptions, 4,403 food reviews, and 1,184 celebrity social media posts.

You Think Failure Is Hard? So Is Learning From It.

Society celebrates failure as a teachable moment. But do people actually learn from failure? Although lay wisdom suggests people should, a review of the research suggests that this is hard. We present a unifying framework that points to emotional and cognitive barriers that make learning from failure difficult.

Motivating Personal Growth by Seeking Discomfort.

Achieving personal growth often requires experiencing discomfort. What if instead of tolerating discomfort (e.g.

Surprised elaboration: When White men get longer sentences.

We present a new consequence of stereotypes: they affect the length of communications. People say more about events that violate common stereotypes than those that confirm them, a phenomenon we dub . Across two public data sets, government officials wrote longer reports when negative events befell White people (stereotype-inconsistent) than when the same events befell Black or Hispanic people (stereotype-consistent).

Can't wait or won't wait? The two barriers to patient decisions.

Impatience results from the belief that waiting is either too hard or not worth it. Distinguishing between these barriers informs which intervention will increase patience. Making waiting easier increases patience when people are unable to wait.

Megastudies improve the impact of applied behavioural science.

Policy-makers are increasingly turning to behavioural science for insights about how to improve citizens' decisions and outcomes. Typically, different scientists test different intervention ideas in different samples using different outcomes over different time intervals. The lack of comparability of such individual investigations limits their potential to inform policy.

Goal Changes and Healthy Aging.

This article discusses ways in which aging individuals respond to physical, social, and environmental changes and constraints by modifying their goals. We review aging-related trends, which we derive from several theoretical approaches, including goal systems theory, the motivational theory of life-span development and its action-phase model, and the Selection, Optimization, and Compensation model. These theories explain how biological and social role changes in later adulthood prompt individuals to make changes to the content, orientation, and composition of their goals, including disengaging from and adjusting previously central goals.

Love is patient: People are more willing to wait for things they like.

How does liking of a target affect patience? One possibility is that the more people like a target the less patient they are for it, because it is more difficult to resist the attractive smaller-sooner option to wait for the larger-later option. However, across six studies ( = 2,774), we found evidence for the opposite effect. Specifically, an increase in liking was correlated with an increase in patience (Study 1), and when people made decisions about a target they liked more, they were more willing to wait for a better quality version of it (Studies 2 and 3) and a larger amount of it (Study 4).

Trade-Offs in Choice.

To explain trade-offs in choice, researchers have proposed myriad phenomena and decision rules, each paired with separate theories and idiosyncratic vocabularies. Yet most choice problems are ultimately resolved with one of just two types of solutions: mixed or extreme. For example, people adopt mixed solutions for resolving trade-offs when they allow exercising to license indulgence afterward (balancing between goals), read different literary genres (variety seeking), and order medium-sized coffees (the compromise effect).

Food restriction and the experience of social isolation.

Across 7 studies, food restrictions increased loneliness by limiting the ability to bond with others through similar food consumption. We first found that food restrictions predict loneliness using observer- and self-reports among children and adults (Studies 1-3). Next, we found mediation by the experience of worry and moderation by eating similar food as others.

Not Learning From Failure-the Greatest Failure of All.

Our society celebrates failure as a teachable moment. Yet in five studies (total = 1,674), failure did the opposite: It undermined learning. Across studies, participants answered binary-choice questions, following which they were told they answered correctly (success feedback) or incorrectly (failure feedback).

The first-member heuristic: Group members labeled "first" influence judgment and treatment of groups.

People often make judgments about a group (e.g., immigrants from a specific country) based on information about a single group member.

Shared Plates, Shared Minds: Consuming From a Shared Plate Promotes Cooperation.

A meal naturally brings people together, but does the way a meal is served and consumed further matter for cooperation between people? This research ( N = 1,476) yielded evidence that it does. People eating from shared plates (i.e.

Dear Abby: Should I Give Advice or Receive It?

Typically, individuals struggling with goal achievement seek advice. However, in the present investigation ( N = 2,274), struggling individuals were more motivated by giving advice than receiving it. In a randomized, controlled, double-blind field experiment, middle-school students who gave motivational advice to younger students spent more time on homework over the following month than students who received motivational advice from expert teachers (Experiment 1).