When people encounter problems in translating their goals into action (e.g., form New Year's resolutions earn at best a sympathetic smile when they announce their heroic intentions (e.g., exercising regularly, avoiding unhealthy foods). Though the audience may concede that such resolutions are made with good will (Oscar Wilde is less trusting), they doubt their effectiveness. This suspicion is deeply rooted. Folklore tells us that "the road to hell is paved with good intentions." Do good intentions deserve this bad reputation? As the many empirical studies based on Ajzen's (1985) theory of planned behavior demonstrate, there is no reason to assume that good intentions have nil effects or even negative effects on behavior. Quite to the contrary, strong intentions (e.g., "I strongly intend to do x") are reliably observed to be realized more often than weak intentions (see reviews by Ajzen, 1991; Conner & Armitage, in press;Godin & Kok, 1996). However, the correlations between intentions and behavior are modest; intentions account for only 20% to 30% of the variance in behavior. As well, the strength of the intention-behavior relation varies drastically with the type of behavior that is specified, and people's past behavior commonly turns out to be a better predictor than their intentions. Most interesting, the weak intention-behavior relation is largely due to people having good intentions but failing to act on them (Orbell & Sheeran, 1998).In light of these findings, it seems unjustified for applied psychologists to advise people who are motivated to do good to refrain from forming good intentions, but suggesting that good intentions are an effective self-regulatory tool is also unwarranted. What is needed is a theoretical and empirical analysis of how people's good intentions can be made more effective. Once this is known, forming good intentions and effective ways to implement them can be suggested to people who are motivated to change their behavior.How good intentions can be implemented effectively has been analyzed in recent research on goal striving (for a review, see Gollwitzer & Moskowitz, 1996). Forming good intentions or setting goals is understood as committing oneself to reaching desired outcomes or to performing desired behaviors. For various reasons, people may often refrain from such binding goal commitments (e.g., Oettingen, in press), but even if people make goal commitments, the distance between goal setting and goal attainment is often long (Gollwitzer, 1990). Successful goal attainment requires that problems associated with getting started and persisting until the goal is reached are effectively solved.The question of how goals, once set, can be made more effective therefore boils down to asking for the variables that determine effective goal pursuit. Some answers are suggested by recent research on goal striving. First, it matters how people frame their good intentions or goals. For instance, better performances are observed when people set themselves challenging, specific goals as compared...

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It is proposed that goals can be activated outside of awareness and then operate nonconsciously to guide self-regulation effectively (J. A. Bargh, 1990). Five experiments are reported in which the goal either to perform well or to cooperate was activated, without the awareness of participants, through a priming manipulation. In Experiment 1 priming of the goal to perform well caused participants to perform comparatively better on an intellectual task. In Experiment 2 priming of the goal to cooperate caused participants to replenish a commonly held resource more readily. Experiment 3 used a dissociation paradigm to rule out perceptual-construal alternative explanations. Experiments 4 and 5 demonstrated that action guided by nonconsciously activated goals manifests two classic content-free features of the pursuit of consciously held goals. Nonconsciously activated goals effectively guide action, enabling adaptation to ongoing situational demands.We must give up the insane illusion that a conscious self, however virtuous and however intelligent, can do its work singlehanded and without assistance. -Aldous Huxley, The Education of an AmphibianToday, most theories of goal pursuit emphasize conscious choice and guidance of behavior on a moment-to-moment basis (e.g

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The theoretical distinction between goal intentions ("I intend to achieve -c") and implementation intentions ("I intend to perform goal-directed behavior y when I encounter situation z"; P. M. Gollwitzer, 1993) is explored by assessing the completion rate of various goal projects. In correlational Study 1, difficult goal intentions were completed about 3 times more often when participants had furnished them with implementation intentions. In experimental Study 2, all participants were assigned the same difficult goal intention, and half were instructed to form implementation intentions. The beneficial effects of implementation intentions paralleled diose of Study 1. In experimental Study 3, implementation intentions were observed to facilitate the immediate initiation of goaldirected action when the intended opportunity was encountered. Implementation intentions are interpreted to be powerful self-regulatory tools for overcoming the typical obstacles associated with the initiation of goal-directed actions.

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To investigate how people anticipate and attempt to shape others' self-regulatory efforts, this work examined the impact of abstract and concrete mindsets on attention to goal-relevant aspects of others' situations. An abstract (relative to a concrete) mindset, by making accessible the cognitive operation of considering activities' purpose (versus process) was predicted to focus attention on how others' self-evaluative situations could impact others' long-term aims of self-knowledge and self-improvement, thus facilitating the anticipation and preference that others pursue accurate, even self-critical, feedback. Participants in an abstract (relative to a concrete) mindset both anticipated (Experiment 1) and suggested (Experiments 2a and b) that others pursue realistic rather than overly positive self-relevant information, with the latter effect apparently explained by the salience of abstract versus concrete goal-relevant features of others' situations (Experiment 2b). Implications for self-regulatory mindsets, as well as for interpersonal relations, are discussed.

Six studies examined the goal contagion hypothesis, which claims that individuals may automatically adopt and pursue a goal that is implied by another person's behavior. Participants were briefly exposed to behavioral information implying a specific goal and were then given the opportunity to act on the goal in a different way and context. Studies 1-3 established the goal contagion phenomenon by showing that the behavioral consequences of goal contagion possess features of goal directedness: (a) They are affected by goal strength, (b) they have the quality of goal appropriateness, and (c) they are characterized by persistence. Studies 4 -6 show that people do not automatically adopt goals when the observed goal pursuit is conducted in an unacceptable manner, because the goal will then be perceived as unattractive. The results are discussed in the context of recent research on automatic goal pursuits.