Effects Of Valuation And Decision Strategy On Goal-deviating Behaviors

In daily life,when we set a long-term goal,almost everyone will always face the temptations that distract us.It is not only individuals,but also a common phenomenon of deviating from long-term goal when facing temptations for organizations and even countries.What is called "the very beginning mind itself is the most accomplished mind of true enlightenment".Increasing goal-directed behaviors and decreasing goal-deviating behaviors are of great significance to the success of individuals,organizations and countries.So far,most researches on goal-directed and goal-deviating behaviors are carried out at the level of the long-term goal and temptation,the common consensus has been reached on its mechanism,that is,people avoid temptations and approach long-term goals through the process of self-control.The mainstream hypothesis of self-control conflict in academia is based on the results of two competing processes,namely dual-systems model.Such model usually considers self-control to be implemented through two opposing processes,namely,reflective process and impulsive process.However,Berkman et al.(2017)proposed value-based choice model of self-control,which regarded the success or failure of self-control as a result of the relative valuation of decision options.Based on the value-based choice model of self-control,this study considers the occurrence of deviating behaviors as action competition and action preference reversal caused by the conflict between short-term temptations and long-term goals from the perspective of decision making trade-offs,trying to explore the effect of valuation on the choice of goal-directed/-deviating behaviors.Besides,the valuation model predicts that each option in a self-control conflict accumulates subjective value based on an arbitrary number of value inputs.That is to say,all decision-makers use the option-based decision strategy.Previous intertemporal decision-making research proposed that when individuals make decisions,they used not only option-based decision strategies,but also dimension-based decision-making strategies.Thus,this study considers that the goal-directed/-deviating behavior as an intertemporal sequential decision making,not all decision-makers adopt the option-based decision strategy in the choice of goal-directed/-deviating behaviors,there are also individuals who adopt the dimension-based decision strategy.In the first study,participants were asked to evaluate their preferences between healthy but yucky foods and unhealthy but tasty foods through weight losing/fitness situation.Results indicate that the directed/deviating behavior valuation and the immediate/delay behavior valuation both have effects on the goal-directed/-deviating action choice of decision-makers,and the goal-directed behavior valuation has a greater impact on the choice preference than the goal-deviating behavior valuation.Similarly,compared with the immediate behavior valuation,the influence of delayed behavior valuation on choice preference is greater.Study 2 applied the goal-directed/-deviating dynamic simulated decision paradigm based on Mouselab procedure.Participants were asked to choose between noise cards and video cards that could win or lose a certain fraction respectively.This study repeats the results of study 1,and finds that different decision-making strategies have a significant effect on the choice of goal-directed/-deviating behaviors.Compared to individuals using the option-based decision strategy,the deviating rate of individuals using the dimension-based decision strategy is lower.In study 3,the same goal-directed/-deviating dynamic simulated decision paradigm was adopted as in study 2.Participants decision strategies were primed by slightly changing the information presentation.The result shows that the priming of different decision strategies does affect decision-makers' goal-directed/-deviating choice preference.In particular,the deviating rate of participants in dimension-based priming group is significantly lower than the participants in option-based priming group and control group.However,there is no significant difference between the deviating rate of participants in option-based priming group and control group,which further confirms the robustness of study 2.This study explores the effects of valuation and decision strategy on goal-directed/goal-deviating behaviors,revealing the important reality phenomenon that the short-term behaviors deviating from the long-term goal,filling the gap of this domain to a certain extent.In addition,this research is based on the value-based choice model of self-control rather than the prevalent dual-systems model.Results support the value-based choice model of self-control and further extend it.Finally,we adopt the paradigm of goal-directed/-deviating dynamic decision making to probe the deviation tendency of decision makers.This paradigm integrates the key elements of the valuation and selection of the target action in the dynamic situation and is expected to be one of the classic paradigms in this field.