When your goals inspire my goals: the role of effort, personal value, and inference in goal contagion.

ABSTRACT: Just observing other people can influence what we do. Under certain conditions, it inspires us to strive for the same goal as the other person. Such goal contagion occurs, because one first automatically infers the goal and then adopts it for oneself. In a series of three experiments (overall N = 840 university students), we investigated personal goal value and the observed person's effort as moderators of goal contagion, which is mediated by goal inference. In all three experiments, participants read a brief story about a student who either wants to earn money (target goal) or to do an internship (control) and expects to show much or little effort. In Studies 1a and b, goal inference was the dependent variable, whereas in Study 2, we considered the full moderated-mediation model an

SUBMITTER: Corcoran K 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7909217 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature