Maintenance Vs. Attainment Goals: Influence of Self-Regulation Goal Type on Size of Consideration Set and Preferred Temporal Dispersion of Goal Fulfilling Effort

Current research in goals has ignored maintenance (versus attainment) goals in which the current state coincides with or exceeds (versus lags) the desired state. Four studies with students and actual gym users show that maintainers prefer a temporally dispersed-effortfully less intense goal fulfilling strategy while attainers prefer a temporally concentrated-effortfully more intense strategy. Mediation analysis reveals this is because attainers hold stronger instrumentality bias, a belief that more intense effort will result in better reward. Also, maintainers, who focus on both process and outcomes of strategies, consider and use fewer goal fulfilling strategies than attainers, who focus more on strategies’ outcomes.

Citation:

Napatsorn Jiraporn and Kalpesh Kaushik Desai (2011) ,"Maintenance Vs. Attainment Goals: Influence of Self-Regulation Goal Type on Size of Consideration Set and Preferred Temporal Dispersion of Goal Fulfilling Effort ", in AP - Asia-Pacific Advances in Consumer Research Volume 9, eds. Zhihong Yi, Jing Jian Xiao, and June Cotte and Linda Price, Duluth, MN : Association for Consumer Research, Pages: .