Does Goal Pursuit Require Conscious Awareness?

Fifteen. Does Goal Pursuit Require Conscious Awareness? Ruud Custers, Stefan Vermeent, Henk Aarts

Abstract

Human behavior is directed at goals. Although goal pursuit is traditionally regarded as an endeavor that requires conscious awareness, experimental evidence in psychology suggests that human goal pursuit can originate and unfold in the unconscious. Accordingly, goal-directed behavior could be motivated outside conscious awareness in the current situation or environment. This chapter reviews past and current research examining the evidence for such unconscious motivation of goal-directed behavior. The review is organized around two themes. The first theme deals with research that analyzes goal pursuit as automated behaviors, thereby addressing the operational function of repetition for motivated processes in directing and controlling behavior in the absence of conscious awareness. The second theme concerns the quest of understanding the unconscious sources of human goal pursuit and includes a discussion of recent work on reward cueing, aimed at addressing the question of how reward signals in the environment can motivate behavior outside awareness.

Page two hundred sixty-nine. Any meaningful behavior humans engage in is goal directed. Humans do not behave randomly; they behave to realize specific states or outcomes they find desirable. From taking a walk in the park to buying groceries or making coffee, they pursue outcomes, which requires keeping an eye on the prize, choosing the right courses of action, and monitoring their progress. Although conscious processes play an important role all the way from planning to the execution of behavior, this role may decrease as individuals plan and execute particular goal-directed actions repeatedly in the same context. Most people make their morning coffee absentmindedly, pondering what the day is going to bring, instead of engaging in careful deliberation or planning the process of coffee making. Consciousness, then, may drop out of the equation for such well-rehearsed goal-directed behaviors. Although such examples are numerous, it is less clear how goal pursuit is possible without much assistance of consciousness.

In the current chapter, we aim to clarify how goal pursuit might emerge largely outside awareness. We will depart from the literature on habits and ideomotor theory, arguing that stimuli in the environment can activate outcome representations that, in turn, can trigger the associated actions that have produced these outcomes in the past. However, we assume that for goal pursuit to be supported by the effort it requires, rewarding properties of the outcome play a crucial role. We will review recent work that investigates how such motivational properties can motivate behavior without much conscious intervention. We believe that a more thorough understanding of how goal pursuit may operate under the radar of conscious awareness is beneficial for understanding and intervening in human behavior because the majority of the goals we pursue day to day are repetitive in nature, in terms of how we aim to attain them as well as the context in which we do so.

Page two hundred seventy. Goal Pursuit Without Awareness: Some Preliminary Thoughts and Findings

Modern theories of goals consider goal pursuit mainly a conscious affair: In the event of a challenge or opportunity, we compare potential courses of actions to determine which one to pursue to produce the desired outcome, mainly based on the expected value of the outcome that motivates the pursuit. We then deliberate and select the means that will produce the outcome and monitor the progress toward the goal as we engage in them. However, several lines of research suggest that different aspects of goal pursuit may operate fairly automatically, without much thought and under the radar of conscious awareness.

First, there is a rich literature on judgment and decision-making suggesting that affect plays a key role in the formation of attitudes, expected value, and choice, often bypassing deliberative processes. Such an affect-driven influence on human behavior has been demonstrated in several research programs. For instance, people can implicitly form attitudes on the basis of simple evaluative conditioning procedures in which neutral stimuli are linked to affective stimuli, sometimes without being aware of the conditioning process. Furthermore, studies employing decision-making tasks suggest that judgment and choice are nearly impossible without emotional processes. Human subjects have been shown to approach decision options and avoid others based on their bodily sensations and feelings that accompanied the decision-making process, an effect that does not seem to rely on consciousness and has been dubbed the somatic marker hypothesis. A nice illustration of this hypothesis pertains to the act of flipping a coin to decide what to do. It turns out that a certain positive or negative sensation can become manifest when tails or heads determines one decision of a specific course of action, indicating a preference was already present.

Second, rooted in Murray's concept of needs and its role in personality, a substantial research program on social motivation suggests that specific patterns of preferences and decision-making can be driven by implicit motives. Implicit motives are defined as motivational dispositions that operate outside of people's conscious awareness and are aimed at the attainment of specific classes of incentives. These motives are presumed to build on evolutionarily old systems (midbrain structures) that appear to develop in a preverbal stage and are guided by what is pleasant and aversive during socialization experiences. Self-attributed motives, that is, motives that a person can express and report on explicitly, are thought to depend on evolutionarily more recent systems (cortical structures) that develop later in childhood and are sensitive to language via verbal commands from others, self-instructions, and explicit knowledge about norms and values. As a result of the early, nonverbal way in which they are acquired, implicit motives tend to develop independently from conscious awareness and hence are difficult to articulate. Self-attributed motives, in contrast, are suggested to rely on consciousness and are therefore readily accessible to verbal reports. Accordingly, implicit motives must be assessed indirectly, for example, with projective instruments such as the Thematic Apperception Test. Self-attributed motives can be measured directly with instruments that rely on the capacity for introspection, such as self-report questionnaires.

Research on implicit motives largely focuses on three main social needs, namely achievement (i.e., the desire to prosper and gain success), power (i.e., the desire to influence and control others), and affiliation (i.e., the desire for friendly social interactions). Once these motives are established, they orient, select, and energize behavior. Indeed, several studies reveal that people's behavior can be reliably predicted by achievement, affiliation, and power motives that are measured by the Thematic Apperception Test or alternative projection measures and this predictive value does not necessarily correspond with the predictive value of explicitly generated motives.

Finally, others have argued that such implicit motives can be acquired as a situational goal state. Situational goal states are shaped by direct experience and other types of learning to act in a goal-directed way (e.g., I want to earn money) in a specific context (e.g., when I enter the office), such that after some repetition the context is able to trigger the pursuit of the goal at hand. Such priming effects (effects in which the mere exposure to information renders knowledge, such as a psychological concept, ready for later use) are proposed to build on knowledge structures including the context, the goal itself, and actions as well as opportunities that may aid goal pursuit. For example, the goal of consuming fruit may be related to eating a banana while having lunch in the university cafeteria. Or, a visit to an exclusive restaurant or bar may be connected to interacting with good friends and the desire to socialize and go out. Thus, when activating or priming a goal by the associated context (e.g., eating fruit when going for lunch in the cafeteria), we do not access a single concept, but rather a rich structure containing, among other things, cognitive, affective, and behavioral information.

There is a long list of studies that seem to underscore the notion that goal pursuit can be triggered by the environment outside awareness. Such environment-driven goal pursuit can be evoked either directly, for example, by exposure to goal information, such as words associated with achievement, or indirectly, for example, by exposure to specific aspects in the social environments, such as significant others or observation of another's behavior.

Although the evidence for unconscious goal pursuit is mounting, the findings have been criticized on two grounds: First, whereas this research suggests that goal pursuit can be triggered by the environment, the claim that this occurs outside awareness has been questioned. Specifically, tests of unawareness rely on checks that ask participants to assess whether they have seen goal-relevant stimuli (relevant for controlling the unconscious processing of input) or to explicitly report in retrospect whether the presented environment or stimuli influenced them. These measures have two problems: (a) subjects might simply have forgotten what happened before in the study or they are not willing to reveal their experiences of being influenced (or not); and (b) apart from recollection and motivational problems, the evidence for unconscious processes is said to be provided when there is no relation between the manipulation, awareness checks, and dependent variable. In other words, the test of awareness is based on a null effect. Whereas null effects can exist, inadequate sample sizes and small effects might produce a Type Two error, such that one fails to reject a false null hypothesis.

Second, in line with a general concern for robustness of research findings, it has become clear over recent years that one should not take evidence of an effect as solid proof or facts. Several nonreplications of psychological experiments have demonstrated that not all studies are as easily replicated. In this, research on unconscious processes in goal pursuit is no exception, with a recent joint replication effort involving many labs finding that only thirty-six percent of studies psychology-wide produce the same results when repeated. For one, these failures to replicate have statistical and methodological reasons. Most studies use small samples and are thus susceptible to noise. In combination with selective reporting of successful studies (i.e., the file drawer problem) and researchers having too many degrees of freedom to analyze and report data, the prevalence of environmental control of goal-directed behavior may have been heavily overestimated. Nonetheless, a recent meta-analysis of the effects of behavior priming established a small effect (Cohen's d of zero point three three) across several studies that in one way or another show that action words can trigger actual behavior. Most notably, priming effects were stronger when actions were more subjectively valued or desirable. Despite the methodological concerns, this is encouraging.

Apart from these methodological concerns, the priming literature offers a fairly heterogeneous pallet of studies. Although research participants are commonly exposed to priming-sensitive information, the relation between the primes and the actual representation of the concept that is assumed to be activated comprises substantial variation. Primes can be words, observed behavior of others, objects related to a goal of actions, and so forth. At the same time, it is not always clear how goals or action-related concepts are assumed to be represented (e.g., amodal knowledge, embodied action, or outcome representations), so it is hard to predict whether a relevant representation will be activated in the first place. Moreover, motivational factors are often overlooked. That is, primed behavioral constructs may be related to an individual's goal and therefore priming effects may differ from one concept to another and from one person to the next. Because most studies do not take into account such motivational moderators, priming effects on behavior may be present or absent. Finally, there is little agreement about the behavioral measures to detect priming effects and these measures may differ in their sensitivity, the exact properties of behavior they pick up (direction of behavior, invested effort, etc.), and the match with the behavioral effects.

It appears, then, that there is not consensus about either conceptual analyses or experimental procedures to be able to offer a clear operational definition of the topic under investigation. Such clarity might help to understand and appreciate (some of) the findings on environmental control of goal pursuit that possibly occurs outside awareness. But what, then, are the mechanisms that produce these effects? In the next section we present a possible account for these findings.