The Effect of Self–Awareness on the Identification of Goal–Related Obstacles

Antonia Kreibich,Veronika Brandstätter,Marie Hennecke

doi:10.1002/per.2234

Antonia Kreibich, Veronika Brandstätter + Show 1 more

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https://doi.org/10.1002/per.2234

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Abstract

When individuals strive towards personal goals, they may encounter obstacles that could compromise their goal progress and pose a challenge to self–regulation. Coping with obstacles first requires those obstacles to be identified. The purpose of the present studies was to apply an inter–individual approach to this important, but insufficiently studied self–regulatory aspect of goal striving. We therefore examined the role of self–awareness, that is, paying attention to one's own feelings, thoughts, and behaviours, for the identification of goal–related obstacles. We measured and manipulated self–awareness in two correlational and two experimental studies (one of them preregistered) and asked participants to identify obstacles to their goals. All studies confirmed the hypothesis that individuals with higher levels of dispositional and situational self–awareness identify more obstacles, both with regard to their idiosyncratic personal goals (Studies 1 and 2) and with regard to a goal in an assigned task during an experiment (Studies 3 and 4). The results indicate that self–awareness plays a crucial role for identifying obstacles. We discuss the implications of our findings for personality and self–regulation research.

Highlights

When individuals strive towards personal goals, they may encounter obstacles that could compromise their goal progress and pose a challenge to self–regulation
In line with our hypothesis, the degree of dispositional self-awareness was positively correlated with the item-based measure of participants’ identification of obstacles (r = .27, p = .003, 95% CI = [0.10, 0.43])
We focused on goal monitoring as an underlying process of the relationship between self-awareness and the identification of goal-related obstacles

Summary

Introduction

When individuals strive towards personal goals, they may encounter obstacles that could compromise their goal progress and pose a challenge to self–regulation. We measured and manipulated self–awareness in two correlational and two experimental studies (one of them preregistered) and asked participants to identify obstacles to their goals. One fundamental aspect of self-regulation in the context of obstacles that has been neglected so far is, the identification of obstacles and the question of antecedents that turn an individual’s attention towards potential obstacles during goal pursuit. We take a personalitypsychological perspective and focus on individual differences in self-awareness, the tendency of a person to become the object of his or her own attention (Duval & Wicklund, 1972), as a potential antecedent of the identification of obstacles. By investigating self-awareness in the context of daily goal pursuit, we rely on literature emphasizing the importance of personality processes for investigating selfregulatory processes (Hoyle, 2010)

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