Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- About the Editors
- List of Contributors
- Preface
- The Sydney Symposium of Social Psychology series
- 1 Social Motivation: Introduction and Overview
- PART I CONSCIOUS AND UNCONSCIOUS SOCIAL MOTIVATION: GENERAL ISSUES
- PART II SOCIAL MOTIVATION: COGNITIVE AND AFFECTIVE IMPLICATIONS
- 8 From Evolved Motives to Everyday Mentation: Evolution, Goals, and Cognition
- 9 Automatic Goal Inference and Contagion: On Pursuing Goals One Perceives in Other People's Behavior
- 10 The Interaction Between Affect and Motivation in Social Judgments and Behavior
- 11 Internal and External Encoding Style and Social Motivation
- 12 Authenticity, Social Motivation, and Psychological Adjustment
- 13 Motivation and Construct Accessibility
- PART III CONSCIOUS AND UNCONSCIOUS SOCIAL MOTIVATION: SOME CONSEQUENCES AND APPLICATIONS
- Author Index
- Subject Index
- References
9 - Automatic Goal Inference and Contagion: On Pursuing Goals One Perceives in Other People's Behavior
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 August 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- About the Editors
- List of Contributors
- Preface
- The Sydney Symposium of Social Psychology series
- 1 Social Motivation: Introduction and Overview
- PART I CONSCIOUS AND UNCONSCIOUS SOCIAL MOTIVATION: GENERAL ISSUES
- PART II SOCIAL MOTIVATION: COGNITIVE AND AFFECTIVE IMPLICATIONS
- 8 From Evolved Motives to Everyday Mentation: Evolution, Goals, and Cognition
- 9 Automatic Goal Inference and Contagion: On Pursuing Goals One Perceives in Other People's Behavior
- 10 The Interaction Between Affect and Motivation in Social Judgments and Behavior
- 11 Internal and External Encoding Style and Social Motivation
- 12 Authenticity, Social Motivation, and Psychological Adjustment
- 13 Motivation and Construct Accessibility
- PART III CONSCIOUS AND UNCONSCIOUS SOCIAL MOTIVATION: SOME CONSEQUENCES AND APPLICATIONS
- Author Index
- Subject Index
- References
Summary
INTRODUCTION
The well-being and survival of social animals depends, among other things, on grasping – and sometimes adopting – other people's goals. For example, to better prepare oneself for the future, one may need to be able to successfully predict others' behaviors. Predictions of this sort must take into account others' goals, as goals are important determinants of human behavior. Furthermore, in everyday social interactions, an understanding of the goals motivating others allows one to entertain similar goals and to try to attain them oneself – for the sake of personal as well as social needs.
A necessary prerequisite for processes of this sort is an ability to encode others' behaviors in terms of the goals they desire and aim to attain. Sometimes these goals are readily available to the perceiver, as they are communicated explicitly. More often than not, however, goals are not explicitly conveyed, due either to resource constraints that limit communication or because they are nonconsciously pursued (and hence are not consciously available even to the person who pursues them). Similar constraints may thwart the adoption of others' goals even when such an adoption is warranted. Thus, limited resources, or lack of awareness, may hinder one's capacity to consider and adopt the goals of other people.
Our well-being, then, may depend on processes that allow us to infer goals and adopt them effortlessly and nonconsciously. In this chapter we develop a framework for the comprehension and examination of automatic goal inference and pursuit.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Social MotivationConscious and Unconscious Processes, pp. 153 - 167Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2004
References
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