Goal Priming and the Affective-Motivational Route to Nonconscious Goal Pursuit

Abstract

Recent work has discovered that human goal pursuit can emerge in the absence of conscious awareness. Whereas the evidence of these goal priming effects is mounting, it remains a mystery how the mental apparatus informs people to pursue a primed goal in the absence of conscious will. This paper addresses this issue by proposing an affective-motivational route to nonconscious goal pursuit. Specifically, it is suggested that positive affect associated or coactivated with the cognitive representation of a goal triggers the motivation to pursue the given goal, while negative affect ceases it to the extent that the goal is already positive and thus carries potential motivation to pursue the goal when being primed. The paper discusses recent findings speaking to this conceptualization of nonconscious goal pursuit and presents two new experiments that examined the role of positive affect in rendering people ready for goal pursuit by testing effects on functional size perception. A substantial share of research in social cognition centers on the question of how people set and pursue their goals. In the search for the mental faculties that make us uniquely human, people’s goal pursuit is assumed to be governed by a kind of “self” or some other inner agent such as “consciousness” or “the will.” This assumption is reflected in several theories and models of goal-directed behavior, such as the theory of reasoned action (Fishbein & Ajzen, 1975), goal-setting theory (Locke & Latham, 1990), self-determination theory (Deci & Ryan, 1985) and selfefficacy theory (Bandura, 1986). They all share the view that goal setting is accompanied by a conscious reflection process, and that goal pursuit is associated with conscious intent. However, it may be questioned whether goal pursuit should be always characterized by a conscious and willful process. As our thinking and doing are produced by mental processes that are not always open to introspection,