When Intentions Go Public: Does Social Reality Widen the Intention-Behavior Gap?
Gollwitzer and colleagues tested what happens when someone announces an intention connected to the kind of person they want to become, such as telling others they intend to read law journals regularly on the way to becoming a lawyer. Across four experiments, intentions that other people had noticed were acted on less than intentions that had been ignored, both in the field over a week of self-directed effort and in the laboratory when a chance to act appeared. The effect held for people strongly committed to the identity and not for those weakly committed, which is counterintuitive and is what makes the finding useful. The explanation their fourth experiment supports is that being noticed delivers some of the reward the behaviour was supposed to earn: the announcement itself produces a premature sense of already being the person in question, and the need to act on it drops. The theory behind it is self-completion. This vault cites it whenever the advice to announce your goals comes up.
Gollwitzer and colleagues tested what happens when someone announces an intention connected to the kind of person they want to become, such as telling others they intend to read law journals regularly on the way to becoming a lawyer. Across four experiments, intentions that other people had noticed were acted on less than intentions that had been ignored, both in the field over a week of self-directed effort and in the laboratory when a chance to act appeared. The effect held for people strongly committed to the identity and not for those weakly committed, which is counterintuitive and is what makes the finding useful. The explanation their fourth experiment supports is that being noticed delivers some of the reward the behaviour was supposed to earn: the announcement itself produces a premature sense of already being the person in question, and the need to act on it drops. The theory behind it is self-completion. This vault cites it whenever the advice to announce your goals comes up.
Written from the abstract, OpenAlex.
What our sources record
Reproduced as it was written when this source was checked, figures and all.
20, 612-618. Four experiments; identity-related intentions noticed by others were acted on less intensively than those ignored, in the field over one week and in the laboratory; held among participants with strong but not weak commitment to the identity goal.
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- Never Show a Fool Your Work Until It Is Complete, Why We Work
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The link below was matched against the publisher's record on title, first author and year, and all three agree.
The source
https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2009.02336.x
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9280.2009.02336.x