Impact Of Task Difficulty On Choices Between Goal-directed Actions And Goal-Deviating Actions

Throughout the ages,human's progress and development cannot be separated from goal pursuit.How to promote the implementation of goal-directed actions in the process of goal pursuit is one of the focuses of behavioral decision making area.In real life,however,people not only need to focus on actions consistent with the pursuit of long-term goals,but also need to resist the goal even with the existence of attract factors.The emergence of tempting factors will make many organizations and individuals take short-term actions that do not help or even be detrimental to long-term goals from time to time in the event that long-term goals have not changed.One question that is worth exploring is whether people's choices between goal-directed actions and goal-deviating actions will be different when they face with different levels of task difficulty.Previous studies rarely involved short-term actions and long-term goals in one single study.The study of task difficulty more focused on the results of the experimental tasks.Explorers almost never explored the impact of task difficulty on the choices between these two kinds of actions.Based on the previous research results of task difficulty and short-term goals,this research studies the theoretical hypothesis about the impact of task difficulty on people's choices between goal-directed actions and goal-deviating actions.3 studies are conducted to uncover the phenomenon and its mechanism.Study 1 reveals the impact of task difficulty on people's choices between goal-directed actions and goal-deviating actions.Study 2 and study 3 use different task paradigms to repeat the research results of study 1.In addition,Study 2 validates the moderate effect of self-efficacy.The reason why task difficulty can affect people's choices is explored in study 3.Main conclusions are:(1)the higher the task difficulty,the more people choose goal-deviating actions;(2)the phenomenon above can be replicated under various experimental tasks,indicating that the effect is stable;(3)self-efficacy moderates the relationship between task difficulty and people's choices between the two kinds of actions.(4)negative emotion plays a mediate role in the effect.