Setting One’s Mind on Action: Planning Out Goal Striving in Advance

Ineffective goal striving may be overcome using a simple self-regulation strategy: preparing goal striving in advance by forming implementation intentions (i.e., making if-then plans). This strategy helps to cope with the classic challenges to goal striving: getting started, staying on track, not overextending oneself, and disengaging from faulty means. Interestingly, these beneficial effects are observed no matter whether hindrances from within (e.g., ego depletion) or outside (e.g., social influence) the person are to be dealt with. In this essay, the processes on which the beneficial effects of implementation intentions are based will be discussed by pointing to relevant research using cognitive task paradigms and assessing brain data. Moreover, recent findings are reported demonstrating that implementation intentions can be used to curb reflexive cognitive, affective, and behavioral responses that interfere with a person’s focal goal pursuit. In closing this essay, a behavior change intervention (i.e., mental contrasting with implementation intentions) is introduced that establishes the prerequisites for implementation intention effects to occur, and research areas in psychology are pointed to that could benefit from conducting implementation intention research. SETTING ONE’S MIND ON ACTION: PLANNING OUT GOAL STRIVING IN ADVANCE Being strongly committed to a goal is a necessary but often not sufficient step toward goal attainment as the way to the goal may be cobbled with difficulties, hindrances, and set-backs (Bargh, Gollwitzer, & Oettingen, 2010). The problems of goal implementation that people aremost frequently confronted with are the following: people may fail to get started with goal striving, fail to stay on track when goal striving has been started, overextend with striving for the goal at hand thus losing sight of goals in other equally important life domains, and finally, people may fail to disengage from an unattainable goals or futile means. In fact, meta-analytic findings suggest that goals (also Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Edited by Robert Scott and Stephan Kosslyn. © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. ISBN 978-1-118-90077-2.