Abstract
How do consumers resolve goal conflicts en route to making a choice? To answer this question, we examined choices in which two products were means to achieving different and conflicting goals. To glean insight into how consumers reconcile predecisional goal conflict, we tracked emerging preferences and used changes in these preferences to infer changes in goal activation. Emerging preference patterns from various choice studies indicated that an initially active goal, which had been set aside to reconcile a goal conflict, exerted greater than expected influence on the remainder of the choice process. We infer from this that activation of the set aside goal escalated as if its pursuit had been impeded by an external force. Four studies find that that this type of goal reversion is common and that it is moderated by goal commitment.
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