Nonconscious Nudges: Encouraging Sustained Goal Pursuit

Abstract

A person can use a variety of strategies to sustain the pursuit of a conscious goal (e.g., deliberate on the goal, monitor goal progress, increase goal commitment). However, less is known about how to sustain the pursuit of a nonconscious goal, a reality that is reflected in the common finding that nonconscious goal pursuit typically persists for only one choice episode. This research investigates two factors that help sustain the pursuit of a nonconscious goal: increasing the level of goal activation prior to goal pursuit and limiting the extent of goal deactivation after a goal-consistent behavior. When one of these two factors is present, nonconscious goal pursuit is sustained, as evidenced by a longer sequence of goal-consistent choices. Five studies compare and contrast strategies for sustaining conscious and nonconscious goal pursuit and provide insight into how the goal system manages the pursuit of a nonconscious goal. In addition, the findings inform when a consumer is more or less likely to pursue opposing goals across sequential choices (e.g., being virtuous after being indulgent).

Self‐control: Information, priorities, and resources

“…In addition, when people experienced a feeling of pride, putting them under cognitive load decreased choice shares of an indulgent alternative (i.e., gift certificate for buying entertainment products; Wilcox, Kramer, et al, ). This occurred because under cognitive load people were not capable to process the achievement associated with pride, which made them refrain from indulging (see Laran et al, , for a similar finding).…”

“…While many assume information activation and inhibition is automatic (Chartrand, Dalton, & Cheng, ), this does mean that some amount of resources is not necessary. In fact, cognitive load may block people from pursing certain goals even when the goal was nonconsciously activated (Laran et al, ). Thus, it is important to further understand when resources are necessary or not for information activation and inhibition.…”

“…Consequently, understanding the causes of self‐control provides an avenue for developing strategies that foster self‐control successes and reduce self‐control failures. The importance of helping people exert self‐control explains the proliferation of self‐control research over the past decade (Wang, Bendle, Mai, & Cotte, ), which has identified a number of factors that lead consumers to exert self‐control or indulge (Klesse, Levav, & Goukens, ; Laran, Janiszewski, & Salerno, ; Schwartz, ; Shen, Zhang, & Krishna, ). Examples include consumers' emotions (Salerno, Laran, & Janiszewski, ), goals (Ülkümen & Cheema, ), resource availability (Cannon, Goldsmith, & Roux, ), and individual characteristics (Laran & Janiszewski, ; Tangney, Baumeister, & Boone, ).…”

Boundaries of Constructive Choice: On the Accessibility of Maximize Accuracy and Minimize Effort Goals

“…More nuanced findings suggest that there may be ways to encourage the use of the same process goal across consecutive choices. Process goal consistency may be more likely when a choice process is executed more quickly than expected (e.g., Huang & Zhang, 2011), when there is awareness of the process goal (Laran, Janiszewski, & Salerno, 2019), when the process goal is easy to implement (Werner, Milyavskaya, Foxen‐Craft, & Koestner, 2016), or when a difficult‐to‐implement process goal suggests competence (Cheng, Mukhopadhyay, & Schrift, 2017).…”

“…Consequently, people should assign more value to means that can achieve more than one noncompeting process goal (e.g., minimize effort, minimize negative emotion). More nuanced findings suggest that the use of a process goal means may be facilitated by making it more accessible (Laran, Janiszewski, & Salerno, 2016, 2019), more salient (Pieters & Wedel, 2007), more abstract (Shaddy & Fishbach, 2018), more familiar (Laran, Janiszewski, & Cunha, 2008), or by creating a stronger association to the goal, independent of the efficacy of the means (Zhang & Tu, 2011).…”