Are You Doing What I’m Doing? Goal Projection in Conversation

Abstract

The primary focus of the current research is goal projection or the ascription of a perceiver’s own goal onto an interaction partner (i.e., target). Extending the finding that perceivers project their goal onto a target (Kawada, Oettingen, Gollwitzer, & Bargh, 2004), two studies applied a cognitive conceptualization of goal pursuit and detection to explain boundary conditions for goal projection in conversation. Experiment 1 demonstrated that the strength of the cognitive association between perceivers’ goal and the social context moderated projection: Projection was greater for strongly than moderately or weakly linked goals. Experiment 2 established that the target’s goal pursuit efficiency and the congruency between the perceiver’s and the target’s goals influenced projection: Compared with targets’ efficient pursuit of nonidentical goals, projection was greater (a) when the target and perceiver had the same goal regardless of efficiency or (b) when they had different goals but the target was inefficient.