Abstract
Even though planning is generally helpful in goal pursuit, people do not always choose to plan. The inclination to plan might depend on whether we focus on what we seek to approach or what we seek to avoid. In two pre-registered experiments, we tested the relative effect of approach versus avoidance motivation on willingness to plan (total N=1349). With outcome framing as the experimental manipulation, participants were randomly assigned to either an approach or an avoidance condition, and then indicated their willingness to plan their study activities before an upcoming exam. Contrary to predictions, the results showed no significant difference in willingness to plan depending on condition in either experiment. There was mixed support for the importance of anticipated affect and perceived distance as process mechanisms: While Experiment 1 showed that participants who experienced the day of the exam as closer in time were more willing to plan their study preparations (regardless of condition), we found no mediational effects through perceived distance or anticipated affect. In Experiment 2, anticipated affect intensity mediated the association between motivation and willingness to plan, where participants induced to approach motivation predicted greater intensity of anticipated affect upon achieving their goals, and thus were more willing to plan, than participants induced to avoidance motivation. However, such mediational effects without a main effect remain ambiguous and should be interpreted with caution. Seen as a whole, the results suggest that the effect of different motivation types on the willingness to plan may be different than previously thought: They may not influence this aspect of goal striving.
Highlights
The power analysis was based on the main hypothesis in this experiment
Motivational state was entered as the independent variable, anticipated affect intensity and perceived distance were entered as the mediators, and willingness to plan as the dependent variable
There was no difference in the willingness to plan between participants in the two experimental conditions, suggesting that people do not plan differently for what they want to approach compared to what they want to avoid
Summary
Given that people make plans quite frequently, they may have different reasons for doing so. Others have reported no relationship between approach-oriented imagery and plans for physical activity (Chan & Cameron, 2012) These diverging results suggest a need for studies that test bi-directional competing hypotheses about the effects of approach versus avoidance motivation on willingness to plan. The manipulation check of the experimental induction showed that participants in both conditions were relatively promotion-oriented This suggests that the results may be more illustrative of how people plan under varying degrees of approach motivation than of how they plan differently for approach and avoidance. The research question concerns whether willingness to plan is greater for approach motivation or greater for avoidance motivation, and whether an effect of this kind can be explained by anticipated affect and perceived distance. Mediation hypothesis 3: Perceived temporal distance will mediate the relationship between motivational state and willingness to plan, where approach motivation will cause participants to perceive the day of the exam as temporally closer, and avoidance motivation will cause participants to perceive the day of the exam as temporally further away
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