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Task Interruption and Resumption Paradigm for Testing the Activation and Pursuit of an Abstract Thinking Goal
Published on: April 18, 2017
Liking is for doing: the effects of goal pursuit on automatic evaluation
Melissa J Ferguson1, John A Bargh
1Department of Psychology, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853, USA. mjf44@cornell.edu
Abstract:
Findings from 3 experiments suggest that participants who were actively engaged in goal pursuit, compared with those who were not pursuing the goal, automatically evaluated goal-relevant objects as relatively more positive than goal-irrelevant objects. In Experiment 3, participants' automatic evaluations also predicted their behavioral intentions toward goal-relevant objects. These results suggest the functional nature of automatic evaluation and are in harmony with the classic conceptualization of thinking and feeling as being in the service of "doing" (e.g., S. T. Fiske, 1992; W. James, 1890; K. Lewin, 1926) as well as with more recent work on the cognitive mechanics of goal pursuit (e.g., G. B. Moskowitz, 2002; J. Y. Shah & A.W. Kruglanski, 2002).
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