Experimental Study Of Working Memory-based Goal Setting Theory

In motivation theory, the goal setting theory has became a focus of motivation theory because of its good maneuverability. However, Goal Setting Theory is encountering a bottleneck in its experimental paradigm. In order to respond to the idea of Locke that the goal setting theory still needs to be developed, the paper examines the goal setting theory from the perspective of the cognitive psychology. The experiment makes use of DMDX software to establish two experimental tasks on visual spatial working memory and digital working memory. The task difficulty variable is divided into three levels by the pass rate of the pre-test's result (the subject with the pass rate approach to 20% is classified as high-task difficulty; that with the pass rate between 50% to 60% is classified as medium-task difficulty; that with the pass rate more than 80% is classified as low-task difficulty). Each group is directed by different instructions in order to decide the levels of goal difficulty and goal specificity, for example, the group of non-specific goal is given the instruction of "do your best to complete all the tasks in different task difficulty"; the group of low-goal difficulty is given "you must give the right answer in 2 of the 10 subjects at least"; the group of medium-goal difficulty is given "you must give the right answer in 5 of the 10 subjects at least" and the group of high-goal difficulty is given "you must give the right answer in 8 of the 10 subjects at least". Among the four levels of goal difficulty and goal specificity, three belong to specific goal, that is low-goal difficulty, medium-goal difficulty and high-goal difficulty. Goal acceptability is measured by three-point Likert multiple choice. For example, "Toward the goal that complete 20% of all the task difficulty, your feeling is:1, I tried to reach the goal; 2, I could not reach the goal but tried to get close; 3, I ignored or rejected assigned the goal". According the answer, they are classified into three categories in terms of goal acceptability, that is high-goal acceptability, medium-goal acceptability, and low-goal acceptability. The role of the goal setting is examined by taking the number of subjects with correct answer as dependent variable. The results showed that setting specific goals with certain difficulty can make the subject produce a higher level of effort than setting vague or general goals, which improves the performance in turn(p=0.000 in two tasks); setting specific but less difficult goals has no significant difference compared with that of nonspecific goals (in visual spatial working memory p=0.311, in digital working memory p=0.054); the easier the subjects accept goals, the better performance they show(p=0.000 in two tasks); the moderating effect of the task difficulty variable to goal difficulty and performance variable can be showed by the exploration and use of the strategy of subjects and tolerance of time pressure (in visual spatial working memory p=0.163, in digital working memory p=0.182). The innovative aspect of this paper lies in using visual spatial working memory and digital working memory to verify the goal setting theory, which may offer a new research direction in future.