E. J. Masicampo

Who they are

The 2011 paper gives Masicampo's affiliation as the Department of Psychology at Florida State University. He is listed with the Department of Psychology at Wake Forest University, which hosts the paper on his staff pages. This page records only what the paper and institutional pages state. Biography beyond the cited work is not given here.

Key papers

Consider it done! Plan making can eliminate the cognitive effects of unfulfilled goals (2011), with Baumeister. In a series of studies, participants were reminded of important goals they had not yet met. Unfinished goals caused intrusive thoughts during an unrelated reading task, made goal-related words more mentally accessible, and lowered performance on an anagram task. When participants also wrote a specific plan saying how, when and where they would meet the goal, those effects disappeared. In the first study, about two in three participants in the unfinished-task group reported their minds wandering while reading, against one in three of those who had planned. Simply listing possible actions without committing to one did not help. The abstract concludes: "Once a plan is made, the drive to attain a goal is suspended."

Key ideas

The work suggests that a plan acts as a temporary finish. An unfinished goal keeps tugging at attention until it is done, or until a concrete plan for doing it is in place. The studies measured intrusive thoughts and attention, not memory, which fits the 2025 meta-analysis finding that the lasting effect of interruption is a pull to resume rather than better recall.

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