How To Make Our Goal Go Public? Studies Of The Influential Factors On Effect Of Motivating Us Toward A Goal Under The Condition Of Social Reality

Self-completion theory(SCT) suggests that, we will do a battery of behaviors to gain our identity goal, when we have enough commitment toward to it. And these behaviors represent the identity symbols. Other studies have shown that when individuals gain some identity symbols through some behavior, for example, making their intentions go public, they will feel a sense of completeness, and this feel will weaken their motivation later. In other words, social recognition of an identity-relevant behavioral intention will offset the sense of incompleteness of the identity goal, and have negative effects on the goals’ enactment. However individuals have the dynamic regulatory. The self-regulation theory proposes that we will consider two conditions when we pursue our goals. One is the value of the goal itself, namely the commitment to the goal, the other is the distance between the current level and the expectation level, namely the distance to goal. Because the goals we discuss in this paper are identity goal which having high level of commitment, our aim is whether the discrepancy between the current goal state and the desired goal state will influence the sense of completeness on the condition of social reality.In order to explore this influence, this research starts with two aspects: first, in study 1, we operate the focus on a task(focus on the completed part of the task vs. Focus on the uncompleted part of the task) in the context of high commitment to this task; second, in the study 2 we prime different goal frame(priming the superordinate goal vs. No priming the superordinate goal). From this two aspects, we discuss that whether the behavioral intentions are impacted by the different task focus or the different goal frames on the condition of the social reality.In addition, in study 3 we continue discuss whether there are personality preference in searching audience and whether different audience attribute have different effect on the sense of completeness toward the goal by interview. The research concludes as follows:In study 1, we find that the sense of completeness of the subjects who focus on the uncompleted part of the task was significantly greater than the other subjects who focus on the completed part of the task on the condition of social reality.In study 2, we find that the reaction time of the subjects in the condition of priming the superordinate goal was faster than the other subjects in the condition of no priming the superordinate goal.In study 3,by analysis of the results of interview, we find that the personality preference of whether need audiences is about the self-esteem level, the type of the goal orientation. And the different audiences attribute will lead to the different effects on the sense of the completeness of the goal.In conclusion, our research explained that social recognition of an identity-relevant behavioral intention have negative effects on its enactment. However these effects can be weaken by the focus of the different goal state and priming the different goal frames. Different level of self-esteem and type of goal orientation have different personality preference on the need of audiences. And different audiences have different influence on the sense of completeness towards goal.