Goal Interference

Goal Interference

Reviewed by Faisal Zaidi

Goal interference is Adam Gazzaley and Larry Rosen's umbrella term for anything that gets in the way of a goal you have already decided to pursue. Their useful move is the split. Interference is either internal, coming from your own mind, or external, coming from the world, and it is either a distraction, which you try to ignore, or an interruption, which you take on as a second goal. The two-by-two is the part worth keeping, and the evolutionary story attached to it is narrated rather than tested.

What it is

The claim is not that people lack ambition but that they lack the machinery for carrying ambition out, so goals get set faster than they can be enacted. The four cells are the operational part, because they separate what looks like a single failure into several. The components underneath are standard cognitive science: attention is selective, working memory is small, and two tasks demanding control compete for the same prefrontal resource. The frame around those components is the authors' own, and they present it as such, with one endnote and no study behind the taxonomy itself.

In effect

The book's own worked example is a drive home. A phone buzzes on the passenger seat and you do not pick it up, which is external distraction. You start wondering who it was, which is internal interruption. A thought about tomorrow's meeting drifts in, internal distraction, and you begin planning the meeting, internal interruption. Then you pick up the phone, external interruption. One journey, five different failures, and only the last is what people usually mean when they say they were distracted.

What it does not say

It does not say the distinction is applied consistently. Harshad Puranik's 2020 integrative review of 247 publications finds the research scattered across disciplines, with inconsistencies in how interruptions are defined and studied that reduce the generalisability of results and produce conflicting findings. Internal against external is the coding distinction every proportion in this literature rests on, so figures from different studies are not strictly comparable, and the field documents that itself. It also does not say that goal-setting outran goal-enactment in human evolution, which is the book's narrative rather than its evidence and should not be repeated as a finding.

Sources

  1. Gazzaley, A. and Rosen, L. D., The Distracted Mind: Ancient Brains in a High-Tech World, The MIT Press, 2016. Chapter 1, figure 1.1, pp. 3 to 17, and chapter 4, p. 63. The taxonomy carries one endnote and no study; it is the authors' own framework and they say so.
  2. Puranik, H., Koopman, J., & Vough, H. C. (2020). 'Pardon the Interruption: An Integrative Review and Future Research Agenda for Research on Work Interruptions.' Journal of Management, 46(6), 806-842. doi:10.1177/0149206319887428. An integrative review of 247 publications. It has no sample and tests nothing; it is the source for the inconsistency of definitions across disciplines.
  3. Mark, G., Gonzalez, V. M., & Harris, J. (2005). 'No task left behind? Examining the nature of fragmented work.' Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '05), 321-330. doi:10.1145/1054972.1055017. The observational study that puts numbers on the internal and external split, fifty-two per cent against forty-eight per cent.