When goals conflict but people prosper: The case of dispositional optimism

Abstract

Optimistic persistence in pursuing goals may have beneficial consequences such as protection against negative affect and greater likelihood of goal attainment, but persistence can also result in greater likelihood of goal conflict, which can have negative consequences. Two studies, one cross-sectional (N = 100) and one longitudinal (N = 77), found that optimism associated with higher goal conflict. However, objectively rated goal conflict did not significantly undermine adjustment, and when balance among goal value, expectancy, and conflict was considered, optimism associated with better balance. In turn, balance accounted for part of optimists’ better goal progress over the course of a semester. Although goal conflict may have costs, these costs appear to be offset by accompanying benefits, particularly for optimists.

Introduction

Ample evidence links goals to well-being. Goals can provide structure, meaning, identity, and a sense of purpose, and progress toward goals results in positive affective states such as hope, enthusiasm, and pride (Cantor and Sanderson, 1999, Carver and Scheier, 1990, Deci and Ryan, 2000, Emmons, 1986, Koestner et al., 2002). Dispositional optimism—generalized positive outcome expectancies—lead people to pursue their goals more doggedly, especially in the face of difficulty (Carver & Scheier, 1998). In empirical demonstrations of this proposition, more optimistic people persistently pursued difficult performance goals in the laboratory, exerted more daily effort to reach personal social and health goals in the face of pain and fatigue, and were more likely to replace rather than give up goals in the face of physical limitations (Affleck et al., 2001, Duke et al., 2002, Solberg Nes et al., 2005). In one study, goals partially mediated the relationship between optimism and psychological health (Duke et al., 2002). Optimistic expectancies, therefore, can increase the odds that a goal will be engaged, pursued, and attained, with positive implications for psychological health.

On the other hand, goals also have the potential to undermine well-being. Because not all goals can be actively pursued at once, some goals must be engaged at the cost of other goals, so that any time a person holds multiple goals (i.e., virtually all the time), those goals can conflict with each other. For example, at a research conference, a person might pursue knowledge goals by hearing as many talks as possible or social goals by standing in the hall and gossiping with colleagues. However, because that person can only be in one place at any given time, pursuing one set of goals precludes pursuing the other set. Even worse consequences for well-being may ensue when pursuing one goal undermines the other one. For example, pursuing a goal to lose weight undermines a goal to go out for ice cream with one’s friends, and vice versa. Goal conflict can lead to ambivalence about progress toward either and concomitant decrements in psychological and physical health (Cantor et al., 1992, Carver and Scheier, 1990, Emmons, 1986, Emmons and King, 1988, Martin et al., 1993, Riediger and Freund, 2004).

The optimistic tendency to persist in goal pursuit may increase the likelihood of goal conflict. The obvious way to resolve goal conflict is to give up or at least reduce commitment to one of the conflicting goals (Cantor & Blanton, 1996). However, dispositional optimists are less likely to give up on goals than their more pessimistic counterparts, and they may also be more likely to maintain goals despite conflict among them. In fact, because optimism is particularly associated with goal retention in the face of difficulty or obstacles, its effect on goal persistence may be particularly strong when goals conflict. Optimistic people generally have better psychological adjustment than pessimistic people (see Carver & Scheier, 1999, for a review), so if they also experience higher goal conflict, a model is needed to explain why goal conflict does not undermine optimists. The present studies demonstrate that optimists do have higher conflict among their goals and test two hypotheses regarding the relationship between goal conflict and well-being: first, that discriminating between different types of conflict will reveal that optimism leads to more psychologically benign goal conflict and, second, that greater optimism leads to a more effective trade-off between conflict and beneficial goal qualities.

In general, conflict has been treated as a unitary construct, but we propose two kinds of conflict, one inherent to the goals and one reflecting competition for the same resource. Table 1 gives examples from the present studies of inherent and resource conflict. Inherent conflict arises when progress toward one goal implies more difficulty in reaching another goal. In these cases, behavior that brings the person closer to one goal (e.g., be personable) means losing ground on another goal (e.g., do not draw attention to myself). Inherently conflicting goals create opposing standards for self-regulation and therefore ambivalence about the consequences of making progress toward or achieving either goal. Resource conflict arises because there are limited amounts of, for example, time, money, and energy available to pursue valued goals. In these cases, if there were infinite resources available, there is no reason why a person could not achieve both goals. However, in reality, money spent getting one’s car repaired means that there will be less money to buy Christmas presents, and time spent working a job means less time available to devote to going to parties.

Of the two kinds of conflict, resource conflict may impact people less negatively than inherent conflict. First, self-regulatory standards provided by two goals competing for the same resources can still be internally consistent, avoiding ambivalence about one’s own self-concept and behavior. Second, progress toward one goal does not define movement away from the other goal. There may be a slowing of progress toward the other goal, but this is less detrimental than reversing that progress. Optimism could lead to resource conflict because positive expectancies about the amount of time, money, or energy available in the future lead to adoption of resource-intensive goals (Zauberman & Lynch, 2005). Optimists may also maintain these conflicting goals longer. When two goals begin to demand the same resource, additional supplies of that resource may be redirected to maintain them. Optimistic expectancies justify such redirection in the interest of maintaining goals; there would be no sense in redirecting additional resources to pursue goals that one did not expect to be realized in the end.

On the other hand, optimistic beliefs should not lead people to adopt inherently conflicting goals because inherent conflict arises from choosing goals badly, not from utilizing or over-utilizing resources. Although optimistic people may make additional efforts to maintain inherently conflicting goals because of their general predisposition to persist, the relationship between optimism and inherent conflict should be less than that between optimism and resource conflict (for which optimism could lead to both adoption and retention of conflicting goals). Therefore, the first hypothesis about the coexistence of conflict and well-being in optimists is that optimism is more strongly related to resource conflict than to inherent conflict, and resource conflict is likely to be less detrimental to well-being than is inherent conflict.

A second possibility is that the negative effects of conflict are offset by the positive effects of remaining engaged with important goals. After all, dropping a conflicting goal does not only reduce conflict; it also means the loss of a potentially valued goal, which can itself have negative effects. The question of whether it will be better to maintain a goal despite conflict or drop a goal despite its value depends on the degrees of value and conflict associated with the goal. In traditional expectancy-value models in psychology, the cost of pursuing one goal over another goal has been considered a minor part of the model when it has been considered at all (see Eccles & Wigfield, 2002, for a review).

To more extensively consider opportunity costs arising from goal conflict, we adopted foraging theory from biology (Stephens & Krebs, 1986). Efficient foragers, including carnivores seeking prey and herbivores seeking plant foods, pursue forage in a way that maximizes a function R that includes value (the nutrients that could be obtained from a food source), expectancy (the likelihood of finding that food source), and opportunity cost (the time spent searching for and consuming the food source that could have been spent searching for and consuming other food sources). When value and expectancy are large, R can indicate efficient foraging even when opportunity costs are high. People pursuing goals resemble foragers pursuing food sources in that their goals have value (the consequences of goal attainment), expectancy (the likelihood of attaining the goal), and opportunity cost (conflict, particularly resource conflict), and R may therefore act as a useful index of effective goal strategy and the balance of value and conflict for human goals. If optimism increases R, optimistic individuals are not just tolerating conflict; they are efficiently balancing the benefits and costs of their goals.

In Study 1, we test the prediction that dispositional optimism is associated with goal conflict in a cross-sectional design. We first show that resource and inherent conflict have opposite relationships to goal value, demonstrating divergent validity for the distinction between conflict types. We then test the prediction that optimism will be more closely related to resource than inherent conflict. In Study 2, we replicate the findings of Study 1 in a longitudinal design. We also use goal conflict and the balance between value and conflict as reflected in the foraging function R to predict both well-being and goal outcomes, predicting that (1) resource conflict will be less detrimental to psychological health and goal progress than inherent conflict and (2) when value and conflict are balanced, psychological health and goal progress will be better. We further predict that goal qualities such as R mediate the relationship between optimism and psychological health and goal progress.