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When focusing on a goal interferes with action control: action versus state orientation and over-maintenance of intentions

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Abstract

People vary in action versus state orientation, or the ease versus difficulty by which they can form and enact goals under demanding conditions (Kuhl and Beckmann in Volition and personality: action versus state orientation, Hogrefe, Göttingen, 1994). According to the over-maintenance hypothesis, state-oriented people are prone to think about their intentions in a narrow linguistic format that prevents flexible action control. Two studies tested this hypothesis by manipulating intention focus among action- versus state-oriented participants and examining how well they performed difficult actions. Focusing strongly (rather than weakly) on the task goal led state-oriented participants to make more errors during incongruent trials of a Stroop task (Study 1) and led to greater task-switch costs in response latencies (Study 2). Action-oriented participants showed the reverse pattern, and performed difficult actions more effectively when focusing on the task goal. These findings suggest that focusing on intentions may paradoxically impair action control among state-oriented people.

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Notes

  1. Action control theory was originally proposed by Kuhl and associates in the 1980s (Kuhl 1984). Its presumed cognitive mechanisms of action control were elaborated during the 1990s (Kuhl 1984, 1994a). In the 2000s, the theory was extended into a personality systems interactions (PSI) theory, a comprehensive functional analysis of motivation and personality (Kuhl 2000). The interplay between intentions and action is a major aspect of PSI theory and is thus fully consistent with the present work. However, PSI theory also makes assumptions about the affective modulation of action control, which are beyond the present scope. In this article, we refer to this family of theories collectively as the ‘action-theoretical perspective’.

  2. Within the action-theoretical tradition, the term ‘goals’ often denotes mental representations of desired outcomes, whereas the term ‘intentions’ often denotes mental representations of to-be-enacted behaviors. Although we agree that this differentiation is theoretically meaningful and useful, we note that, within contemporary psychology, researchers have often used the terms ‘goals’ and ‘intentions’ interchangeably (e.g., Austin and Vancouver 1996). Because the theoretical comparison between goals and intentions is not central to the present research, we followed the general convention in treating the two constructs as more or less interchangeable.

  3. In Study 1, a parallel analysis with action orientation as a continuous variable yielded a marginally significant interaction between intention focus and action orientation on Stroop interference, F(1, 55) = 3.3, p = .07, η 2p  = .06.

  4. In Study 2, a parallel analysis with action orientation as a continuous variable yielded a significant interaction between intention focus and action orientation on perseveration, F(1, 55) = 5.78, p = .02, η 2p  = .10.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Social and Organizational Psychology, VU University Amsterdam, van der Boechorststraat 1, 1081 BT, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Hester A. H. Ruigendijk

  2. Department of Clinical Psychology, VU University Amsterdam, van der Boechorststraat 1, 1081 BT, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Sander L. Koole

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  1. Hester A. H. Ruigendijk
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Correspondence to Sander L. Koole.

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Hester Ruigendijk (HAHR) and Sander L. Koole (SLK) jointly developed the design for the present research, jointly interpreted the data, and jointly wrote the first draft of the manuscript. HAHR collected and analyzed the data and revised the manuscript according to SLK’s suggestions. SLK conceived the original theoretical idea for the present research, verified the statistical analysis, and provided critical revisions.

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Ruigendijk, H.A.H., Koole, S.L. When focusing on a goal interferes with action control: action versus state orientation and over-maintenance of intentions. Motiv Emot 38, 659–672 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11031-014-9415-4

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