A theory of goal systems

Across the lifespan, goals change in response to developmental changes in opportunities and demands, but they also bring about developmental changes regarding the acquisition of skills and resources. Generally, developing (selection), pursuing (optimization), and maintaining goals in the face of losses (compensation) contributes to successful development across the lifespan and to healthy aging in particular. Goals are dynamic; their content changes in sync with developmental goals. Moreover, there is a marked shift from a predominant orientation towards achieving gains in young adulthood and an increasingly stronger orientation towards maintenance and the avoidance of losses in older adulthood, reflecting increases in losses in various domains of functioning across adulthood. This shift in goal orientation appears to be adaptive in that older (but not younger) adults report higher well-being, are more persistent, and perform better when pursuing goals geared towards maintenance and loss-avoidance.

It is well-known that the need for both social and financial missions creates tension within social enterprises. Less well-known are the specifics around how and why social entrepreneurs themselves construct and experience their situation. Given people vary in their psychological representations of their goals from concrete (i.e., tasks) to more abstract (i.e., values), we anticipated that goal conflict with engaging in financial activities could vary along these lines, leading to potentially different solutions for support. Through collecting interviews and focus group data using goal hierarchies from 37 social entrepreneurs, we find six constructed realities with different salient goals at different levels of cognitive abstraction which either dictate, conflict with, or are dissociated from financial activities. These can explain why social entrepreneurs perceive their financial activities differently – financial activities as out of sight out of mind, aversive, a ball to juggle, a necessary evil, part and parcel, and as king - which are associated with four experiences of goal conflict (i.e., goal conflict as continual questioning, inevitable, manageable, and irrelevant).

Traditionally, resilience has been viewed as a general positive adaptation to stressors. However, the hallmark of resilience – returning to the previous state following a perturbation – may also have severe downsides, which are often overlooked. Specifically, it may be unrealistic to return to the previous state or resilience may cause a person to become stuck in an undesirable state. In this article, we first call for a more nuanced theoretical conceptualization of resilience. To do so, we draw on insights from dynamical systems theory help to clearly define the role of a stressor and the idealized pathway to adapt to it. Then, we exemplify the potential downsides of resilience in the context of trauma and social adversity, learning, and goal-disengagement. In conclusion, researchers and practitioners should become more cautious with the term resilience and provide nuanced accounts for what they mean to avoid potentially harmful consequences.

While previous studies have highlighted the role of episodic future thinking in goal pursuit, the underlying cognitive mechanisms remain unexplored. Episodic future thinking may promote goal pursuit by shaping the feeling that imagined events will (or will not) happen in the future – referred to as belief in future occurrence. We investigated whether goal self-concordance (Experiment 1) and other goal characteristics identified as influential in goal pursuit (Experiment 2) modulate belief in the future occurrence of goal-related events and predict the actual occurrence of these events. Results showed that goal self-concordance, engagement, and expectancy had an indirect effect on the actual occurrence of events, which was (partially) mediated by belief in future occurrence. The mediating role of belief supports the view that belief in future occurrence when imagining events conveys useful information, allowing us to make informed decisions and undertake adaptive actions in the process of goal pursuit.

Around the world, people engage in social protests aimed at addressing major societal problems. Certain protests have led to significant progress, yet other protests have resulted in little demonstrable change. We introduce a framework for evaluating the effectiveness of social protest made up of three components: (i) what types of action are being considered; (ii) what target audience is being affected; and (iii) what outcomes are being evaluated? We then review relevant research to suggest how the framework can help synthesize conflicting findings in the literature. This synthesis points to two key conclusions: that nonviolent protests are effective at mobilizing sympathizers to support the cause, whereas more disruptive protests can motivate support for policy change among resistant individuals.

Mentally contrasting a desired future with reality is a self-regulation strategy that helps people effectively pursue important personal wishes. People with higher self-regulation skills are more likely to spontaneously use mental contrasting. Because one central cognitive function underlying self-regulation is working memory capacity, we investigated whether people with low rather than high working memory capacity are less likely to spontaneously use mental contrasting. Study 1 provided correlational evidence that participants with lower working memory capacity, as measured by the Operation-Span Task, were less likely to use mental contrasting when elaborating an important interpersonal wish. Study 2 provided experimental evidence that manipulating low working memory capacity by inducing cognitive load (vs. no load) led fewer participants to use mental contrasting. The findings have theoretical implications by illuminating the processes that impede mental contrasting, and they have applied implications for understanding how to foster the use of mental contrasting in everyday life.