7 Principles of Goal-Based Priming

Seven Principles of Goal Activation:
A Systematic Approach to Distinguishing

Goal Priming From Priming of Non-Goal
Constructs
Jens Frster
Jacobs University Bremen and University of Amsterdam
Nira Liberman
Tel Aviv University
Ronald S. Friedman
University at Albany, State University of New York
Countless studies have recently purported to demonstrate effects of goal priming; however, it is difficult to
muster unambiguous support for the claims of these
studies because of the lack of clear criteria for determining whether goals, as opposed to alternative varieties of mental representations, have indeed been
activated. Therefore, the authors offer theoretical guidelines that may help distinguish between semantic, procedural, and goal priming. Seven principles that are
hallmarks of self-regulatory processes are proposed:
Goal-priming effects (a) involve value, (b) involve
postattainment decrements in motivation, (c) involve
gradients as a function of distance to the goal, (d) are
proportional to the product of expectancy and value, (e)
involve inhibition of conflicting goals, (f) involve selfcontrol, and (g) are moderated by equifinality and multifinality. How these principles might help distinguish
between automatic activation of goals and priming
effects that do not involve goals is discussed.
Keywords:
goal priming; semantic priming; procedural

priming; automaticity; unconsciousness
rom its earliest beginnings, but most prominently during the past decade, research in social cognition has
demonstrated that both information processing and
social behavior are quite substantially, if not inescapably,
moderated by self-regulatory processes (see, e.g.,

Gollwitzer, 1990; Sorrentino & Higgins, 1986; Srull &
Wyer, 1989). Affect, motivation, goals, standards, and
needs appear to influence all stages of the informationprocessing sequence, namely, perception, representation,
and a variety of mental operations, such as inference generation and memory, thereby altering behavior, emotion,
judgment, and problem solving (see Frster & Denzler,
2006, in press; Gollwitzer & Moskowitz, 1996). In
recent years, social cognition researchers also have made
tremendous progress in understanding the extent to
which judgment and behavior are guided without intention or awareness (for reviews, see Dijksterhuis & Bargh,
2001; Frster & Liberman, 2007). Most notably, demonstrations of what has been described as automatic goal
pursuit or implicit volition (Bargh, Gollwitzer, Lee-Chai,
Barndollar, & Trtschel, 2001; Chartrand & Bargh,
1996; Moskowitz, Gollwitzer, Wasel, & Schaal, 1999;
Authors Note: This research was supported by two grants (Fo-392/8-2
and Fo-244/6-3) from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft to Jens
Frster. Special thanks go to Konstantin Mihov for editing the article.
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Jens
Frster, Jacobs University Bremen, School of Humanities and Social
Sciences, PO Box 750561, D-28725 Bremen, Germany; e-mail: j.foerster
@iu-bremen.de.
PSPR, Vol. 11 No. 3, August 2007 211-233
DOI: 10.1177/1088868307303029
2007 by the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Inc.
211
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212
PERSONALITY AND SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY REVIEW
Shah & Kruglanski, 2002) have challenged the field,

revealing the remarkable capacity of the mental system to
efficiently adapt to the environment in the absence of
attentional capacity, consciousness, or volition. However,
although auto-motive researchers (Bargh, 1990; Bargh
et al., 2001; Dijksterhuis & Bargh, 2001) have adduced
compelling evidence that goals are mentally represented
and may be unconsciously activated and pursued, the question remains as to how implicit self-regulatory processes, as
they have essentially described them, may be conceptually and/or empirically distinguished from other automatic, activation-based phenomena, including semantic
and procedural priming (for discussion of this issue, see
Kruglanski et al., 2002; Moskowitz, Li, & Kirk, 2004).
This question will be the focus of this article.
As discovered decades ago, priming of semantic concepts increases their accessibility, facilitating processing of related constructs (see Neely, 1977). For
example, after reading the word lamp, people may
become faster at reading the word light than without
priming. Increased semantic activation due to priming
also may engender perceptual assimilation. For instance,
if participants are exposed to aggression-related concepts by unscrambling sentences such as leg her break
he (Srull & Wyer, 1979), they may use this activated
knowledge in rendering judgments of ambiguously
aggressive target individuals, such that these targets
come to be viewed as more hostile (for a review, see
Frster & Liberman, 2007; Higgins, 1996; Wyer,
2004; for a meta-analysis, see DeCoster & Claypool,
2004).
As alluded to above, priming has also been posited to
activate goals, representations of desired end-states,
thereby eliciting action consistent with goal attainment.
For example, after processing words related to achievement, people have been found to become more competitive (Bargh et al., 2001). However, regardless of
whether goals have indeed been activated, goal-relevant
primes may enhance the accessibility of goal-related
knowledge constructs. For example, a shoe advertisement may trigger the goal to buy new footwear, promoting enhanced accessibility of constructs related to
this goal and thereby engendering increased efficiency at
detecting shoe stores. However, the question remains:
How can we determine whether processing the advertisement has activated a goal or merely enhanced the
accessibility of semantic constructs related to this goal?
Restated, did the advertisement ultimately increase
shoe-store detection by triggering a goal to find new
shoes or by simply rendering the concept of shoes more
active in long-term memory? In this article, we outline
some principles of goal pursuit that may help to answer
such questions. First, however, we briefly review some
of the key findings that have been marshaled in support
of the notion that goals are automatically activated, the

theoretical precepts that have been advanced to account
for these effects, and the means that have been taken to
distinguish between effects of semantic versus goalrelated accessibility.
EVIDENCE FOR AUTOMATIC GOAL

ACTIVATION AND PURSUIT
The empirical finding that may have been most seminal in advancing the notion of automatic goal activation is Bargh, Chen, and Burrowss (1996, Experiment
2) striking demonstration that participants primed with
concepts related to the elderly stereotype (e.g., Florida,
old, lonely) walked more slowly down a hallway compared to those primed with words unrelated to age
(e.g., thirsty, clean, private). In another influential
experiment, Bargh et al. (1996, Experiment 1) showed
that priming the trait constructs of rude versus polite
(using different trait-related words) resulted in participants interrupting an experimenter sooner versus later,
respectively. The two effects were based on consciously
activated knowledge that had an unintended influence
on further behavior. Yet another pivotal finding was
reported by Bargh et al. (1996, Experiment 3), who
discovered that subliminal priming of a young, African
American male face led participants to respond with
more hostility (a stereotypic behavior associated with
this social category) to provocation by the experimenter, as compared to priming with a Caucasian face.
This experiment shows that even though social information such as a face is not consciously perceived, constructs associated with the stimulus can unintentionally
and unconsciously drive behavior with minimal or no
demand for controlled processing (see Bargh, 1994).
These effects have been replicated and extended, and
it is now accepted as common knowledge that exposure
to specific trait constructs, actual behaviors, or social
group members (whose stereotypes contain trait and
behavioral constructs) can result in the nonconscious
expression of the activated behaviors (for review, see
Dijksterhuis & Bargh, 2001): Although there are exceptions (e.g., Dijksterhuis et al., 1998; Mussweiler &
Frster, 2000), priming a trait, a stereotype, or a behavior results in an increased likelihood that individuals
will perform the primed behavior. We will refer to these
effects as behavioral assimilation effects (for a recent
review, see Wheeler, DeMarree, & Petty, in press).
Assimilation occurs if a subsequent behavior reflects the
implication of the prime, whereas contrast or unconscious anchoring occurs if the subsequent behavior
reflects the opposite (see DeCoster & Claypool, 2004;
Frster & Liberman, 2007).
Frster et al. / GOAL AND NON-GOAL PRIMING
Assimilation effects have not only been shown to alter

behaviors but also to alter performance level on speed
tests, intelligence tests, memory tests, creativity tests, and
flexibility tests. For example, priming elderly increases
response latencies on lexical decision tasks (Dijksterhuis,
Spears, & Lpinasse, 2001; Kawakami, Young, &
Dovidio, 2002) and decreases performance on memory
tasks (Dijksterhuis, Aarts, Bargh, & van Knippenberg,
2000; Dijksterhuis, Bargh, & Miedema, 2000; but see
Levy, 1996) and priming professor leads to more correct responses to general knowledge questions, whereas
priming soccer hooligan leads to less correct responses
(Dijksterhuis & van Knippenberg, 1998). Priming
politician results in participants producing longer
essays than those not primed (with long-windedness as
an associated trait of politicians; Dijksterhuis & van
Knippenberg, 2000), and priming punk leads to higher
creativity than priming engineer (Frster, Friedman,
Butterbach, & Sassenberg, 2005).
Other researchers have demonstrated effects of priming
on performance. For example, priming helpful facilitates
helpful behaviors (Macrae & Johnston, 1998), priming
conformity increases consensus (Epley & Gilovich,
1999), priming intelligent leads to more correct
responses on general knowledge questions (compared to
priming stupid; Dijksterhuis & van Knippenberg, 1998),
priming creativity enhances creative thinking (Sassenberg,
Kessler, & Mummendey, 2007), and priming flexibility
reduces perseverance on the Wisconsin Card-Sorting task
(Hassin & Bargh, 2005), to name a few.
Finally, exposing participants to actual behaviors
also has led to similar effects, in that the observed
behavior tends to be imitated (Chartrand & Bargh,
1999; Lakin & Chartrand, 2003). Mimicry of an interaction partners behavior (e.g., facial touching or foot
shaking) has been shown to occur without awareness of
having observed the partner behavior at issue or ones
own expression of the behavior. More recently, Aarts,
Gollwitzer, and Hassin (2004) argued that people may
not only automatically mimic concrete behaviors but
may also adopt and pursue a goal that is implied by
another persons behavior (given that this goal is
socially acceptable). Their research on goal contagion
shows that if participants are presented with behavioral
descriptions implying a certain goal, they may initiate
this behavior if an opportunity is provided to do so,
even without being aware of the influence.
WHY DOES PRIMING AFFECT

BEHAVIOR AND PERFORMANCE?
To account for behavioral assimilation effects,
researchers have introduced both nonmotivational models
213
stating that semantic or associative links between concepts and behavior exist and automatically elicit action
and motivational models that involve the notion of goals
to predict automatic goal pursuit.
One common nonmotivational explanation for automatic behavioral assimilation is based on the assumption of a perceptionbehavior link (Bargh & Barndollar,
1996; Bargh et al., 1996). This link is described as an
unintentional mechanism whereby action is directly
associated with perception so that perceiving a stimulus
may have a direct effect on behavior. Jamess (1890)
principle of ideo-motor action is perhaps the first theory
to suggest that actions are directly connected to mental
representations of the same actions. According to
James, the mere act of thinking about a behavior
increases the likelihood that the behavior will be carried
out, given an appropriate situation for the behavior to
be expressed. Notably, the source of the activation is
irrelevant for the ensuing behaviorboth external
priming (e.g., seeing someone act in the manner at issue)
and an internal thought about a behavior may result in
carrying out a corresponding behavior.
This account resembles classic explanations for
semantic priming (Collins & Loftus, 1975). Presumably,
semantic priming occurs because activation spreads in the
semantic (or associative) network and increases the activation potential of connected constructs, thereby making
their activation more likely. According to the notion of a
perceptionbehavior link, unconscious behavioral priming occurs in much the same way, only some of the constructs in the semantic or associative network are
behaviors rather than constructs. Activation spreads
from the prime to the behavior and makes it more likely
to be carried out than if it had not been primed. As with
semantic priming, this principle predicts that the more
often and the more recently a concept has been activated,
the more likely it will drive enactment of the corresponding behavior given that the behavior is applicable to the
situation (see Wheeler et al., in press).
To summarize, the perceptionbehavior link and
related accounts of automatic social behavior (Kawakami
et al., 2002) posit direct activation of behavioral representations by the act of perception: Perceptual inputs
are translated automatically into corresponding behavioral outputs (Dijksterhuis & Bargh, 2001, p. 1).
However, there are alternative accounts. One muchvaunted possibility is that a prime activates a goal to perform a certain task (Bargh, 1990, 1997). Inasmuch as
goals can be represented in memory (see Kruglanski,
1996; Moskowitz et al., 2004; Shah, Kruglanski, &
Friedman, 2003), it is possible that, for example, the verbal prime aggressive not only activates semantic associates of aggression that eventually lead to aggressive
behavior but also or alternatively activates the goal to
214
aggress against a certain person, thereby eliciting automatic goal pursuit.1 This is because certain features may
be frequently and habitually linked to certain goals
(Bargh, 1997). In a similar vein, people (Aarts et al.,
2004; Fitzsimon & Bargh, 2003; Shah, 2003) or environments can remind one unconsciously or consciously
of ones goals (Aarts & Dijksterhuis, 2003). The aforementioned examples refer to situations in which the
prime and the goal are connected via a history of frequent
co-occurrence. It is important to note, however, that such
connections also may be established by a single act of
volition, that is, the formation of an implementation
intention (Gollwitzer, 1990, 1993; Gollwitzer & Bayer,
1999). For example, when a student decides that at the
end of a biology class she will go to the computing center
to write an e-mail to her mother, biology class may activate the goal to write such an e-mail to her mother automatically, with little or no awareness.2
Aside from this, it is also possible that a prime activates
a procedure. For example, Mussweiler and Frster (2000)
primed women and men with sex-related constructs and
found cognitive accessibility of aggression-related actions
to be enhanced for both genders compared to an
unprimed control group (Mussweiler & Frster, 2000,
Experiment 1). However, in another experiment, an
increase of overtly aggressive behavior after sex priming
was only observed for men (Mussweiler & Frster, 2000,
Experiment 3). The authors argued that procedural priming took place: Because men frequently act aggressively in
sexual situations, the procedures involved in this behavior
are more likely elicited when they are mentally simulating
sex (due to situational exposure to sex-related concepts).
Because women are usually the victims of sexual aggression, for them, activation of a cognitive procedure to
detect cues of aggression is more likely than activation of
aggressive behavioral scripts (as found in another study;
Mussweiler & Frster, 2000, Experiment 4). Thus, even
though the semantic activation of aggression occurred for
both genders, the procedures elicited by the primes were
different for men versus women (cf. Schooler, 2002; Smith
& Branscombe, 1987). Assuming the results of this study
indeed reflect dissociation between perception and behavior, they highlight the difficulty of distinguishing whether
a given manipulation has primed a semantic concept, a
goal, or a procedural routine.
SEMANTIC PRIMING, PROCEDURAL PRIMING,

OR GOALS?
How, then, can we tell whether a prime activated a
goal as opposed to only producing semantic priming?
Let us first emphasize that these are different outcomes:
Not every effect of priming activates a goal. For
example, it is difficult to see how goals might be

involved in the effect of priming lamp on subsequent
(faster) readings of light.3 Two seemingly obvious criteria to distinguish between goal priming and semantic
priming seem to us rather problematic: using the fact
that the effect is behavioral as an indicator for primed
goals, and using the fact that the manipulations
involved motivational, as opposed to only semantic,
content as an indicator of primed goals.
First and foremost, the first account is misleading
because some internalized cognitive operations, such as
judgment or memory, may well involve goals (e.g., fairness vs. accuracy goals, impression formation vs. memorization goals). Second, theories such as the ideomotor
theory suggest that behavior may result from sheer conceptual priming. For instance, the results of the aforementioned study by Bargh et al. (1996), in which elderly
primed participants walked slower, may be seen as
resulting from the operation of the perceptionbehavior
link, a process that in no way requires the involvement
of goals. According to this account, semantic concepts
are directly linked to motor representations. Thus, the
concept of slow, which was presumably activated by the
elderly category, could directly lead to slow walking. If
this is true, one cannot tell from a behavioral measure
that a goal was activated.
The phenomenon of procedural priming introduces
another difficulty with using behavioral outcomes as a
hallmark of activated goals because it presumably
involves goalless actions (see Frster & Liberman, 2007).
Procedural priming refers to priming of proceduresat
the priming phase, people perform or are led to mentally simulate an action and then (facilitating) carryover
effects on the performance of related actions are examined. For example, solving analytical reasoning problems may activate procedures used in such tasks,
thereby transiently facilitating the ability to solve related
problems (Schooler, 2002). Notably, experimental
demonstration of procedural priming does not require
learning of novel procedures. Rather, the action performed at the priming stage is typically overlearned to
such an extent that a few more instances of practice
make virtually no difference (e.g., adding numbers,
inferring traits from behavior).
The distinction between semantic priming and procedural priming is best exemplified by a study by Smith and
Branscombe (1987), who replicated a classic experiment
on the effect of priming on disambiguation of the behavior of a target person (Srull & Wyer, 1979). In addition
to the original priming group, in which participants
unscrambled sentences describing hostile behaviors (e.g.,
leg her break he), they added a procedural priming
condition, in which participants were presented with the
same sentences in an unscrambled form and were asked
to choose the matching trait (e.g., hostile). Inferring traits

from behavior was, in fact, the procedure people needed
to employ when judging the target person in the second
phase. After either 15 s or 15 min, participants rated the
aggressiveness of a description of a vaguely aggressive
behavior. Priming traits (i.e., unscrambling sentences)
had an assimilative effect only after a short delay, but
procedural priming continued to have this effect after a
longer delay. It seems that participants practiced the procedure of extracting traits from behavior and that making
this procedural knowledge accessible facilitated making
such inferences at the test stage.
Notably, procedural priming also may involve fairly
generic cognitive processes, such as processing styles,
because processes elicited in one task may carry over to
another task. Of relevance here is Schoolers (2002;
Schooler, Fiore, & Brandimonte, 1997) theory of processing shifts, which assumes that a cognitive procedure
that is activated in the course of engaging in one task
remains active and is transferred to subsequent tasks.
Transfer-appropriate processing shifts are said to result
when the residually activated procedures are beneficial for
subsequent processing, whereas transfer-inappropriate
shifts are said to result when the procedures at hand
impair subsequent processing. For example, Macrae
and Lewis (2002) found that face recognition was
enhanced following a global processing task and was
impeded following a local processing task. This was presumably the case because the encoding of faces profits
from holistic processing. Procedural priming, like
semantic priming, does not necessarily induce goal pursuit. For example, in Macrae and Lewiss (2002) experiment, it was probably not the case that global processing
instilled in participants a particular goal. Rather, it
facilitated performing certain mental operations (e.g., to
process information in a more holistic way) by virtue of
making them more accessible.
Can we decide that goals have been activated simply
because the manipulation clearly involved motivational
content, such as the use of verbs implying goal-directed
action or intention? For example, if we tell participants
to search for the word aggress among other words, this
may indeed activate the goal of acting aggressively.
However, again, if as the result of this manipulation the
same participants exhibit an enhanced accessibility of
constructs related to aggression, are we to attribute
enhanced accessibility to semantic priming (i.e., merely
mentioning the word aggression) or to an active goal
(i.e., to seek out stimuli related to current concerns)?
Likewise, are individuals primed with the word aggress
more likely to find the experimenter impolite and therefore aggress against him because they perceive an
aggressive response to be more appropriate or, in contrast, are aggressive means to pursue ones goal more
215
accessible (interrupting vs. waiting and suffering)? It is

not easy to find manipulation checks in the literature
that certify that goals have indeed been activated; moreover, it is unclear as to what shape such checks should
take (for a similar challenge, see Wheeler & Petty,
2001). Explicit checks are problematic, not only
because their validity is called into question by the fact
that individuals lack introspective insight into their
motives (Nisbett & Wilson, 1977) but because administration of such checks following implicit or subliminal
goal manipulations will bring goals to consciousness,
undermining the ability to draw conclusions regarding
the automaticity of goal pursuit. Furthermore, in many
cases, asking questions about motivation (e.g., How
motivated were you to complete the task?) seems redundant to the participants and may violate conversational
norms (Schwarz, 1994), thus undermining the diagnosticity of self-reports.
Thus, it seems difficult to conclude from the sheer
nature of the dependent or independent variable whether
an effect was driven by semantic priming, perception
behavior links, procedural priming, or goal pursuit. It is
especially difficult to infer goals from the independent
variable in cases of subliminal priming or unconscious
goal activation. And it becomes even more obvious that
manipulation checks in these cases would exclude selfreports because people do not even know that concepts
(goals, procedures, or concepts) were activated. We
believe that effects of goal activation are qualitatively
different from those of semantic or procedural priming
and suggest a systematic means of distinguishing these
effects. Some researchers have begun to address such
issues (Bargh et al., 2001; Moskowitz et al., 2004;
Wheeler & Petty, 2001) and discussed how different
types of priming may differentially influence behavior.
In the discussion that follows, we will integrate and
expand on their ideas. We propose to do so by examining the processes of goal pursuit. In the remainder of
this article, we will examine seven principles derived
from research on motivation that may be useful in distinguishing goal-priming effects from non-goal-priming
effects. We are by no means suggesting that these principles are exhaustive. However, we hope that they will
prove useful for researchers, particularly those studying
automatic goal activation.
SEVEN PRINCIPLES OF GOAL ACTIVATION

Goal activation may be identified by a set of features
that derive from and often cut across numerous theories of
self-regulation. In short, we suggest that these features may
distinguish goal-priming effects from effects of semantic or
procedural priming. These principles are as follows:
216
1. Goal-priming effects involve value.

2. Goal-priming effects involve postattainment decrements
in motivation.
3. Goal-priming effects involve gradients as a function of
distance to the goal.
4. Goal-priming effects are proportional to the product of
expectancy and value.
5. Goal-priming effects involve inhibition of conflicting
goals.
6. Goal-priming effects involve the operation of self- control
processes.
7. Goal-priming effects are moderated by equifinality and
multifinality.
We now turn to discussing these principles and how they

may help distinguish between goal-related effects, those
reflecting goal priming, and effects that do not necessarily involve goals. We will summarize studies that exemplify such principles, although we admit, sometimes
existing studies do not provide the best example for such
an effect. When existing studies may be interpreted in
terms of semantic priming, we propose possible extensions of these studies that in our view would serve to offer
more conclusive evidence for the principle.
Goal-Priming Effects Involve Value
In the present context, we wish to discuss three aspects
of the connection between goals and value. First, goals
change valuethey make people assign positive value to
things that are conducive for goal achievement and negative value to things that are detrimental for goal achievement. Second, goals involve emotion and energy
mobilization. People feel happy, satisfied, and/or relieved
when they achieve a goal; they feel frustrated, tense,
and/or depressed when they fail to achieve the goal; and
they feel energized, eager, or vigilant in the process of
striving toward the goal. Third, goals are sensitive to
changes in valuethey become stronger or weaker if
value increases or decreases, respectively. Let us examine
how each of these aspects of goals may help us distinguish between semantic priming and goal priming.
Goals affect value. Most generally, people want to
attain positive end states and avoid negative end states.
But what is good and what is bad varies tremendously
from person to person and, more important for our purposes (and even more dramatically), from situation to
situation. For example, when we need to find a screwdriver to assemble furniture, the value of that object
increases relative to a state in which no such goal exists.
We believe that priming a goal should increase the value
of the end state and the value of objects and actions that
are perceived as conducive to goal attainment. Priming
a semantic construct, on the other hand, would not necessarily have the same effect. For example, if priming
furniture activated the goal to assemble furniture,

then the value of a screwdriver may increase, but when
it only activated the semantic construct of furniture, no
such effect on value would be observed.
Of importance, goals have the power to construct
and reconstruct value in a way that does not necessarily
reflect preexisting, overlearned associations between
constructs and evaluations (see Ach, 1910; Custers &
Aarts, 2005; Lewin, 1951).4 For example, if our only
chance to get a screwdriver and therefore assemble our
new furniture is to borrow one from a neighbor, an
excitatory link might be created between neighbor
and furniture, a link that did not exist in the associative network before that situation. Moreover, positive
value would be added to the concept neighbor (or the
association between neighbor and a mental representation coding for evaluative positivity would be strengthened; Bargh, 1997). More generally, a goal pursuit
system is capable of structuring and restructuring the
associative network in line with the actors goals and
the situational affordances, a point to which we will
return when discussing other principles as well.
It is true that semantic priming may affect value via
disambiguation. For example, priming aggression
may enhance perceptions of another person as aggressive, thus also making these impressions more negative compared to a nonpriming condition. As another
example, priming thirsty may enhance the positive
value of the word water because it will make it more
likely to be disambiguated as drinking water rather
than, for example, flood water. Change of value due
to disambiguation is not indicative of a primed goal.
Thus, researchers that use change in value of goalrelated constructs to demonstrate primed goals may
be advised to make sure that such changes were not
merely the result of the primes effects on the way the
target word is interpreted (e.g., by making the target
words nonambiguous).
Many studies have shown that primed goals and
primed needs affect the value of target constructs, but
in these studies, associative links and disambiguation
were not ruled out. For example, priming the goal of
studying enhanced the value of academic concepts
(e.g., library, college) and reduced the value of
nonacademic temptations (e.g., television, chat;
Fishbach, Zhang, & Trope, 2007). Thirst enhanced
the value of water as assessed in implicit measures
(Ferguson & Bargh, 2004). In both examples, value
was assessed implicitly via affective priming. In both
studies, however, the prime and the target constructs
were semantically associated and the target was
potentially ambiguous in value; therefore, these studies do not rule out the possibility that value was in fact
affected by semantic priming.
It is also useful to note that instrumental value

changes in the course of goal pursuit. In our example,
the neighbor would increase in positive value before he
helps us with the tool, but his instrumental value would
decrease sharply after he gives us the tool. Water would
increase in positive value as long as the goal to drink
exists but will lose positive value once thirst is
quenched. Such patterns of value change would thus
serve as a further indication of an active goal.
In a recent study by Ferguson and Bargh (2004,
Experiment 1), participants worked on a word creation
game. Whereas some were asked to perform well
because they would get points for each solution (the
achievement goal condition), others were not (the control condition). All participants completed an implicit
evaluation measure with primes related to the goal (e.g.,
compete, achieve, win) and primes unrelated to the
goal. In addition, some completed the implicit evaluation measure before finishing the word game (the unfulfilled goal condition), whereas some had to complete
the game (the fulfilled goal condition). Results showed
that implicit evaluations of goal-related stimuli (i.e.,
slower responses to negative targets after presentation
of goal primes) were more favorable in the goal condition only if the goal has not been fulfilled. Thus, goal
fulfillment renders formerly favorably valued objects
less favorable because they lose utility. Notably, in
Ferguson and Barghs study, the goal was not primed
but was induced explicitly. We are not aware of
research that has demonstrated a similar effect with
primed goals. If demonstrated, however, such a pattern
of change in value would be indicative of a primed goal
rather than a primed semantic construct.
Goals involve emotion. Closely related to value are
emotions. People feel frustrated, angry, or disappointed
if goal attainment is blocked and they feel happy,
relieved, or satisfied if they attain the goal. If a prime
activates such emotions, then most likely the primes
induced a goal. Further support for an active goal
would be obtained if emotions follow the course that
would have been predicted by active goalstension,
eagerness, and vigilance before fulfillment; happiness
and relief after fulfillment; disappointment and anxiety
after failure. To the best of our knowledge, no such
studies have been conducted. In fact, we can only speculate that these emotions, which typically accompany
pursuit of conscious goals (Carver & Scheier, 1990;
Friedman, 1999), also characterize pursuit of goals that
were activated via priming. If this were to be demonstrated, however, the elicitation of emotions that characterize goal pursuit would demonstrate goal priming as
opposed to priming of semantic constructs. Notably, it
is possible that emotions bring the activated goal to
217
awareness. Thus, if people are happy or disappointed

because they fulfilled or failed to attain a certain goal
that was unintentionally activated, they may infer that
a goal was activated. To the best of our knowledge,
there is no research examining such inference processes.
It also would be interesting to see whether these inferences are invariably correct.
Goals are affected by value. People pursue things
that they value, and the extent of their motivation
depends on the value of the end state. Therefore, if an
effect of priming may be shown to depend on the value
of the prime, then it is likely that a goal, rather than a
semantic construct, has been primed.
Aarts et al. (2004) showed effects of prime value on
goal priming. In one experiment, they primed participants with descriptions of people who worked for money
or on a voluntary basis. Subsequently, they were told that
if time would allow it, they could earn cash by performing a task following the one on which they were currently
working. The time participants took to finish working on
the current task served as an indicator as to how strongly
participants were motivated to earn cash. In an ostensibly
unrelated task, the researchers also measured how much
participants needed money. They found that participants
who read about someone with the implied goal of
making money were faster to finish the task in time to do
the money task, but this only happened for those participants who, by self-report, needed money. The results
show that goal priming only takes place if the primed
behavior is valued by the participants (in the present
experiment, if they needed the money).
Conceptually similar results were demonstrated by
Strahan, Spencer, and Zanna (2002), who showed
effects of subliminal priming on behavior and evaluation in a state of need but not when needs were absent.
In their studies, some participants were made thirsty,
whereas other participants were made nonthirsty before
being primed with names of drinks. Subliminal priming
of thirst-related words led to more beverage consumption only for those participants who were primed with
thirst-related words and who were thirsty compared to
all other participants. In a second study, only thirsty
participants were tested. They were primed with words
related to thirst or with words unrelated to thirst and
then evaluated a thirst-quenching drink and a less thirstquenching drink that was said to be electrolyte restoring. Thirst-primed participants, more than those not
primed by thirst, assigned positive value to the thirstquenching drink but not to the other drink.
Similarly, Shah (2003) found that goals can be
primed by subliminally exposing participants to names
of significant others. He showed that commitment,
goal accessibility, and goal pursuit were enhanced when
218
participants were primed with a significant other that

valued this goal (e.g., their mother valued achievement),
whereas the opposite was true when the significant
other did not like the goal (e.g., their friend preferred
affiliation goals over achievement). The priming effect
was moderated by liking or closeness to the significant
other who valued the goal. For example, if people liked
their mother and the mother valued achievement, then
participants worked harder on a task and were more
committed after mother priming.
Another way to increase the value of end states is by
introducing discrepancies (Higgins, 2006; Lewin,
1951). In a recent experiment, Moskowitz, Li, and Kirk
(2007) reminded participants of their failure to be an
egalitarian person. On the basis of earlier research, they
assumed that this would enhance the value of showing
egalitarian behavior (Moskowitz et al., 1999). Those
participants showed in subsequent tasks less implicit
stereotyping and a higher activation of egalitarian concepts when exposed to stimuli that are related to a
stereotyped group. It is possible to contend that the
reminder of ones failures to be egalitarian increased the
value of showing egalitarianism, and a goal to be egalitarian was activated when exposed to a cue regarding a
stereotyped group. For our purposes, it is interesting to
examine the possibility of inferring a primed goal if it
affects the value of the end state to a greater extent after
a discrepancy to the goal has been activated than in the
absence of such a discrepancy.
Cesario, Plaks, and Higgins (2006) proposed that
upon perception of a social group member, the perceivers motivational system begins to prepare for an
interaction with the primed target. The specific outputs
of this preparation depend not only on characteristics of
the target (Is the target threatening? Is the target
rude?) but also on ones evaluation of the target (Do
I like this target? Do I want to approach or avoid this
target?) and the context of the interaction. Cesario
et al. (2006) primed participants with the elderly stereotype or the youth stereotype and examined their walking speed. In addition, they assessed participants
attitudes toward the elderly and toward youth with an
implicit attitude measure (Fazio, Jackson, Dunton, &
Williams, 1995). The results showed that for participants primed with elderly, as positivity of attitudes
toward the elderly increased, walking speed decreased,
whereas for participants primed with youth, the
opposite occurredpositivity of attitudes toward youth
was associated with increased walking speed.
A critic may argue that associative networks varied for
people who do versus do not like the elderly. More
specifically, it may be argued that for the former, but not
for the latter, walking slower was associated with (and
triggered by) the elderly prime. Would similar results
emerge if the value of the primed group were manipulated rather than assessed? A recent study by Epstude and
Frster (2007) seems to provide an affirmative answer.
In one of their studies, Epstude and Frster (2007)
asked participants to sort cards that could be categorized
only by either shape or color. Prior to this task, a minimal group manipulation was administered (Swinney,
2000; Turner, 1978), in which all participants completed an alleged personality test, which was used to
assign them to groups. Half of the participants received
feedback that they had a concave personality, whereas
others were told that they had a convex personality (cf.
Otten & Wentura, 1999). Before participants started
sorting the cards, they were asked to look at examples
on the computer of how other participants sorted the
cards to get an idea about the task. Half of the photographs on the screen showed sorting based on color,
whereas the other half showed sorting on the basis of
shape. However, before the presentation of the pictures,
participants were subliminally primed with the concepts
convex or concave. For half of the participants,
convex always co-occurred with shape sorting and concave with color sorting; for the other half of the participants, convex always co-occurred with color sorting
and concave with shape sorting. Thus, in some conditions, shapes were associated with the ingroup and
color with the outgroup; in others, shapes were associated with the outgroup and color with the ingroup.
The results of this study showed that participants
were more likely to sort the cards according to the criteria of their ingroup. For example, if convex was subliminally primed before shapes and participants thought
they were in the convex group, then they would tend to
sort the cards by shape as well. This was the case despite
the fact that group membership was minimal, the priming of group membership before participants received
alleged examples of other participants was subliminal,
and participants did not report any relationship
between the personality tests and the sorting task.
Notably, the effects in Epstude and Frster (2007) were
moderated by identification with the ingroup. More
specifically, after they had received feedback about their
performance in the so-called personality test, participants were asked how much they identified with the
convex or concave personality groups. Results showed
that the more participants identified with their respective group, the more they imitated group behavior.
In sum, and most pertinent to the issue at hand, it
seems that people automatically imitate behavior or
start actions upon goal priming only if the primed goal
has value to them. Value can be derived from the situation, as in the above-mentioned case, where ingroup
members ostensibly shared it. The studies show that this
can happen even if the association of a certain behavior
with group membership has been experimentally

manipulated (rather than preexisting) and unconsciously perceived.
Goal-Priming Effects Involve Postattainment
Decrements in Motivation
With its roots in Lewins (1926; see also Lewin, 1951)
field theory, the Zeigarnik effect was demonstrated
whereby people remember interrupted tasks better than
completed tasks (Zeigarnik, 1927; for reviews, see
Butterfield, 1964; Heckhausen, 1991; Wicklund &
Gollwitzer, 1982). Presumably, this occurs because
interruption preserves the goal to complete the task and
maintains the goal-related tension, whereas task completion releases the tension and reduces memory for the
task. More recently, this logic has been applied to social
cognitive research on accessibility as well. Liberman
and Frster (2005) argued that although Lewin and
Zeigarnik did not formulate their findings in terms of
accessibility, the free recall measure they employed
could be interpreted in this manner (see also Tulving &
Patterson, 1968). The Zeigarnik effect could then suggest that goals enhance the accessibility of goal-related
constructs, and goal fulfillment reduces this accessibility.
The most direct evidence for postfulfillment inhibition
comes from Marsh, Hicks, and Bink (1998), who used a
lexical decision task to examine the accessibility of
intended actions both prior to and after goal completion.
In this lexical decision task, participants had to indicate
as quickly and as accurately as they could whether a
string of letters was a word or a nonword. Faster lexical
decisions on semantic associates of a construct indicate a
higher accessibility of the construct (Neely, 1991). First,
replicating an earlier study by Goschke and Kuhl (1993),
they found that before completion, accessibility of
intended actions was enhanced relative to unintended
(i.e., to-be-observed) actions. Second, it also was found
that after performing the action, accessibility of the performed action was inhibited and in fact lower than that
of observed actions, a result that is in line with the notion
of postfulfillment inhibition. Marsh and his colleagues
(1998) conducted their studies within the framework of
prospective memory, and the goals they examined placed
a considerable burden on working memorythey
involved memorizing (and, in the goal condition, also
executing) a series of actions (e.g., distribute the cutlery,
sharpen the pencil, pour the water, spray the aerosol,
stack the articles). It could be, then, that inhibition after
completion is only characteristic of situations in which
memory is overloaded and the system seeks to refresh
working memory.
Recently, Frster, Liberman, and Higgins (2005)
obtained similar findings with less memory-taxing goals.
219
In a series of studies, participants looked through a series

of pictures with the goal of finding and reporting to the
experimenter once they had found a picture of glasses
sequentially followed by a picture of scissors. They were
told that there would be one and only one such combination in the entire set of stimuli. Participants in the control, no-goal condition looked through the same pictures
without being instructed to find a target. Specifically,
glasses and scissors were mentioned to them as examples
of stimuli that they might see but they did not receive any
special instructions about these stimuli. Participants in
both groups looked through four blocks of pictures.
Pictures of glasses and pictures of scissors appeared a
number of times among the stimuli but the target combination appeared only once, in the third block. Thus,
Blocks 1 and 2 constituted the prefulfillment stage and
Blocks 3 and 4 constituted the postfulfillment stage.
After each block of pictures, participants performed
a lexical decision task similar to the one mentioned
above. Words related to glasses, words unrelated to
glasses, and nonwords were presented randomly, and
participants had to indicate as quickly and as accurately
as they could whether a string of letters was a word or
a nonword. In this way, accessibility of goal-related and
goal-unrelated constructs was examined both before
and after goal fulfillment, and it was compared to the
accessibility of the same constructs in a control, no-goal
condition. The results showed that, as predicted, in the
goal condition, accessibility of goal-related words was
enhanced prior to goal fulfillment. Furthermore, it
increased from Block 1 to Block 2. Inhibition of goalrelated constructs was evident immediately after fulfillment, in Block 3. Notably, postfulfillment inhibition
was evident both in comparing the postfulfillment stage
to the prefulfillment stage and in comparing the goal
condition to the control, no-goal condition. It is interesting to note that postfulfillment inhibition was partially released later, in Block 4, indicating that such
inhibition is eventually released (for a detailed discussion on this effect, see Liberman & Frster, 2005).
We argue that diminution of accessibility (i.e., inhibition) after goal completion is another mechanism that
distinguishes goal priming and semantic priming. From
the perspective of semantic priming models (Frster &
Liberman, 2007; Higgins, 1996; Wyer, 2004), goal
attainment merely constitutes activation of a goalrelated construct, and therefore, it should increase
rather than decrease accessibility. To illustrate, in the
experiments by Frster et al. (2005), participants had to
mention the glassesscissors combination to the experimenter as soon as they saw it. According to traditional
models of semantic priming, ongoing consideration of
and search for these target objects should continually
increase their activation levels, thereby increasing their
220
accessibility to consciousness even after goal fulfillment

(Higgins, 1996). Thus, the finding of postfulfillment
inhibition, as opposed to increased or merely persistent
activation, may distinguish accessibility from goals
from accessibility that is due to semantic priming. For
example, if a researcher wishes to investigate effects
from subliminal activation of goals, then she might
measure accessibility of the goal after the goal has been
completed. She should expect a decline of accessibility
relative to baseline after goal fulfillment.
Indeed, Liberman and Frster (2000) used this specific
feature of inhibition after fulfillment to advance a motivational theory of postsuppressional rebound. They reasoned that people may activate the goal to engage in the
suppressed action while they are trying to suppress it.
People may infer this goal from suppression difficulty and
failure to suppress (Frster & Liberman, 2001). For
example, they may think, If it is so difficult for me not
to think of the cake, then it must be the case that I really
want to eat it. In line with the principle of goal activation, Liberman and Frster (2000) reasoned that once a
goal is activated, it renders goal-related information
accessible. Furthermore, they assumed that goal-related
accessibility is different from accessibility due to semantic
priming in that goal-related accessibility should decrease
upon goal fulfillment. In an experiment, Liberman and
Frster (2000) provided to some participants such an
opportunity to attain the goal that was presumably activated during suppression. More specifically, they asked
American undergraduates to describe a day in the life of
an African American person who was presented in a photograph. Participants in the suppression condition were
asked to avoid writing anything racist, whereas participants in the no-suppression condition did not receive any
specific instructions. Afterward, half of the participants
in each condition were assigned to the expression condition, in which they had to describe a day in the life of
another African American person while taking a perspective of a racist writer. Participants in the no-expression
condition did not write another story.
In terms of predictions, the authors reasoned that if a
goal has been activated by the first suppression phase,
then expressing the racist thoughts should constitute goal
fulfillment and accessibility of racist thoughts should
plummet. If, however, suppression only activated racist
thought by way of semantic priming, writing a racist
story should serve to further enhance such accessibility.
The authors measured accessibility of racist stereotypes
by presenting to participants a description of an ambiguously aggressive person and asking them to evaluate him
(see Srull & Wyer, 1979). High accessibility of racist
stereotypes is reflected in higher aggressiveness ratings of
the person because it has been shown that in American
undergraduates, the African American stereotype is
related to aggression and thus renders aggressive content

accessible (see, e.g., Devine, 1989). Replicating the
phenomenon of postsuppressional rebound, in the noexpression group, participants that suppressed racism
(and were given no opportunity to express it in the second phase of the study) rated the person as more aggressive than did participants who did not undergo
suppression. More important, participants who first suppressed racism and then expressed it in the second phase
of the study rated the ambiguously aggressive person as
less aggressive than the group that did not express racism.
Thus, it seems that suppressing racist thoughts had activated the goal to think those thoughts, a goal that was
fulfilled and thus deactivated by further expression of
these thoughts (for reviews of this research, see Frster &
Liberman, 2004, 2005). Such findings strongly point to
the utility of examining patterns of activation and inhibition following presumed goal completion as a means of
detecting the operation of goal priming (for another application, see Liberman, Frster, & Higgins, 2007). In addition, the findings on suppression of thoughts illustrate
that goals that are not made explicit can produce activation and postfulfillment inhibition because participants in
the experiments were not aware of the fact that the goal
to be racist was activated or attained. Notably, in these
studies, participants answers during thorough debriefing
reflected that they neither knew that they were pursuing a
goal nor that they had attained it (see Bargh, 1994).
It is interesting to conceptualize failure as a specific
case of nonfulfillment and predict that accessibility of
goal-related constructs would be higher after failure
than after success. Moskowitz (2002) asked participants to remember either an event of athletic failure or
an event of athletic success. He reasoned that the failure
condition would enhance accessibility of constructs
related to athleticism. Using a Stroop-like measure of
accessibility, he found an enhanced accessibility of athletic words after imagining a failure but not after imagining success. Accessibility of semantic constructs due to
priming should not show a similar sensitivity to success
versus failure, and therefore, those effects may serve to
distinguish semantic priming from priming of goals.
Goal completion sometimes may be achieved via
attaining a substitute goal (Lissner, 1933; Mahler, 1933;
Wicklund & Gollwitzer, 1982; see also principle 7). For
example, if one fails in an exam and if this threatens the
high-priority goal of being intelligent, understanding a
tough passage of James Joyces Finnegans Wake could
potentially compensate for failure in the exam and can
thus reduce frustration and rumination. Koole, Smeets,
van Knippenberg, and Dijksterhuis (1999) demonstrated
that accessibility of task-related concepts after failure
may be halted by self-affirmation of values unrelated to
the task. In a series of experiments, they let participants
fail at an ostensible intelligence task that was manipulated to be unsolvable. Failure increased accessibility of
intelligence-related concepts. This enhanced accessibility,
however, was not evident if, after failure, participants
had a chance to affirm other subjectively important values (e.g., the value of being social or being politically
involved). The results demonstrate that certain values,
such as demonstrating intelligence, serve a higher order
goal of thinking positively about oneself, which can be
attained by different means. After goal attainment, accessibility of the higher order goal may drop (also see Martin
& Tesser, 1996; Tesser & Cornell, 1991; for a more critical discussion of goal fulfillment of abstract goals, see
Liberman & Frster, 2005).
Substitution may be achieved by instantiating fairly
broad goals, as demonstrated by research on self-affirmation
(see Martin & Tesser, 1996). According to research on
self-affirmation, people strive to maintain the overall
integrity of the self, and experiencing different types
of failure (e.g., a failure to maintain consistency of
ones attitudes) may be alleviated by an act of
self-affirmation (e.g., reminding oneself of ones important values; Steele, 1988). Recently, Koole and van
Knippenberg (2006) applied this logic to suppression of
stereotypes. They reasoned that suppression failures create a general sense of tension that can be reduced by
self-affirmation in domains that are unrelated to the suppression content or the act of suppression. Consequently,
any positive feedback on the integrity of the self should
eliminate postsuppressional rebound effects because it
would stop rumination on suppression failures. This is
exactly what they found: After the suppression phase,
participants were either given positive (e.g., You are
very social) or neutral feedback (You are reasonably
social) on a personality questionnaire they had to fill out
before the suppression phase started. Those with the selfaffirming feedback showed no enhanced accessibility relative to a nonsuppression group (i.e., no rebound effect)
compared to the neutral feedback suppression group.
Presumably, the tension produced by the difficulty to
suppress a stereotype was reduced by the self-affirming
feedback. This feedback fulfilled the goal of self-affirmation
and reduced accessibility of goal-related constructs. In
these studies, it is unlikely that participants were aware of
the content of the goal, its activation, or attainment.
In sum, we think that inhibition after goal fulfillment
is an important principle for deciding whether a goal
was primed. Semantic priming mechanisms cannot
explain reduction in the accessibility of goal-related
construct below baseline upon goal completion. Note
that in most of the experiments cited above, participants
explicitly mentioned the goal or goal-related concepts.
For example, in the goal studies by Frster et al. (2005),
participants explicitly told the experimenters that they
221
found the combination of scissors and glasses before

they started working on the lexical decision task.
Similarly, some participants in the Liberman and
Frster (2000) studies wrote racist stories, presumably
fulfilling the goal to use racist concepts that was triggered by suppression instructions, and thus frequently
mentioned stereotypic concepts. By the logic of semantic priming, these should have enhanced the accessibility of goal-related constructs. Instead, goal fulfillment
resulted in inhibition, that is, reduction of accessibility
below baseline (see Higgins, 1996). Of course, models
of semantic priming (e.g., connectionist models; Smith
& DeCoster, 1998) can predict inhibition effects.
However, these models do not specify that inhibition
should follow goal attainment.
Turning from semantic to procedural priming, little
is known about how the latter phenomenon is affected
by completion versus interruption of the priming tasks.
The mechanisms that supposedly underlie procedural
priming (carryover effects, see Schooler, 2002), however, presume that its effects should not be sensitive to
whether the priming task was successfully completed,
interrupted, or failed.
Goal-Priming Effects Show Gradients as a Function
of Distance to the Goal
A classic principle of goal-directed behavior is that
motivational strength increases as distance from the
goal decreases, that is, the goal looms larger as one is
closer to it (Lewin, 1935; Miller, 1944, 1959). In a
landmark study demonstrating this principle, Brown
(1948) trained one group of rats to run down a short
alley to attain food when hungry. Each rat wore a harness connected to a recording device such that the
strength of its pull when stopped at a specific point in
the alley could be measured in grams. Brown (1948)
found that the animals that stopped nearer to the food
pulled harder than those who were stopped farther
away. Further supporting this principle, stronger motivation closer to the goal has been observed in several
other studies, with both animals and humans (e.g.,
Frster, Grant, Idson, & Higgins, 2001; Frster,
Higgins, & Idson, 1998; Gjesme, 1974; Hearst, 1960,
1962; Losco & Epstein, 1977; Miller & Kraeling, 1952;
Miller & Murray, 1952; Murray & Berkun, 1955;
Rigby, 1954; Smith, 1965, 1969).
Generally speaking, goal gradients demonstrate that
goal-driven behavior is situation sensitive (in this case, it
is sensitive to the changing distance to the goal). More
concretely, however, this principle may serve to distinguish between priming of goals and semantic priming.
Specifically, accessibility from semantic priming decreases
fairly rapidly after the onset of the prime. For example,
222
Srull and Wyer (1979) asked participants to judge an

ambiguously aggressive target for 5 min, 1 hour, or 1 day
after the priming task. After 1 hour, when the number of
primes was low (6 out of 30 scrambled sentences were
related to hostility), there was little or no priming effect
(also see Smith & Branscombe, 1987). When the number
of primes was high, slower but still noticeable decay was
observed. Decay changes dramatically, however, if accessibility stems from the activation of goals because accessibility from goals seems to remain as long as the goal is
active and even increase as a function of goal proximity
(see Frster, Liberman, & Higgins, 2005). Most prominently, Goschke and Kuhl (1993) demonstrated this principle by having participants rehearse a series of actions
and then informing them that they would either perform
the actions (i.e., a goal) or observe another person performing them (i.e., a non-goal). Using a recognition test,
they found a higher accessibility of the actions in the goal
condition than in the no-goal condition, even when
rehearsal of the actions was not possible in the intervening time. A similar persistence of the effect of goals was
demonstrated by Bargh and Barndollar (1996), who activated achievement concerns and found that delay
increased, rather than decreased, the effects of priming.
It may be argued that such increases in accessibility
are simply due to rehearsal. For example, a person
searching for his glasses in the morning might repeatedly think, Where are my glasses, did I use them for
reading? Are they near the TV? Who could have them?
thereby rendering goal-related concepts highly accessible. If so, then the lack of decay in accessibility after
goal onset could simply reflect frequent (and recent)
priming. To rule out this possibility, in another study,
Goschke and Kuhl (1993) endowed participants with a
goal and then systematically prevented them from
rehearsing it by asking them to carry out a visuospatial
task requiring spoken responses as participants were
approaching the goal. Nevertheless, they found
increased accessibility the closer participants were to the
goal. Thus, it seems that decay rates from goal activation are different from those of semantic priming and
that this effect cannot be reduced to simple rehearsal.
We should caution that contrary to the classic notion of
goal gradients, motivation does not necessarily increase
closer to the goal (for a recent discussion of this topic, see
Liberman & Frster, in press); for example, our motivation to write an article does not necessarily increase as we
get closer to actually writing it. A careful analysis of how
distance to the goal affects value and how it affects
expectancy may allow us to predict whether motivation
would increase or decrease closer to the goal. For example,
Construal Level Theory (Liberman, Trope, & Stephan,
2007; Trope & Liberman, 2003) proposes a detailed theoretical account of how psychological distance affects value.
It suggests that the positive value of some events (e.g.,

having guests staying at your place for a week) is attached
to the abstract, high-level construals of these events and
thus would increase with distance. In contrast, value that is
attached to a concrete, low-level construal of an event (e.g.,
having a candy) would be reduced with distance. Correspondingly, motivation and accessibility of goal-related
constructs would decrease closer to a goal in the former
case but increase in the latter case.
How do goal gradients help us to distinguish
between primed goals and primed semantic constructs?
We suggest that if postpriming accessibility changes
with distance to the goal in a way that is consistent with
motivation, then we may assume that in all likelihood
the prime activated a goal rather than only produced
semantic priming.
Goal-Priming Effects Are Proportional
to the Product of Expectancy and Value
As alluded to earlier, classic theories of motivation
state that motivation increases with the expectancy of
reaching a goal and with the goals value. This basic
premise underlies expected utility theory in economics
and decision making (e.g., Edwards, 1951), Atkinsons
(1964) theory of achievement motivation, the theory of
reasoned action (Fishbein & Ajzen, 1974), and Vrooms
(1966) theory of motivation in organizational settings,
among others. Of course, expectancy and value are not
always independent, especially in achievement situations
(see Croizer, 1979; Filer, 1952; Irwin, 1953; Teevan,
Burdick, & Stoddard, 1976). But even in these domains,
the expectancyvalue model of motivation prevails, and
it is assumed that both expectancy and value are required
for goal commitment and that they combine multiplicatively (Lewin, Dembo, Festinger, & Sears, 1944; Tolman,
1955; Vroom, 1964; for a review, see Feather & Newton,
1982; Mitchell, 1982). For example, according to the
expectancyvalue model, an applicants motivation to
apply for a job position would increase with the jobs
attractiveness and the estimated chances of getting the
position. Furthermore, obviously, the expectancyvalue
model specifies that expectancy and value combine in a
multiplicative way to determine motivation. Thus, if the
job is not attractive (i.e., attractiveness approaches zero),
then motivation to apply would be low no matter how
likely one is to get the job. In a similar way, if there are
virtually no chances of getting the job, motivation to
apply would remain low even if the job is rather attractive. Based on expectancyvalue models of motivation,
we predict that both accessibility of goal-related constructs and inhibition after goal fulfillment would
increase as a function of the interaction of the perceived
likelihood and value of goal attainment.
Despite its central conceptual role in earlier work on

motivation, although the effect of goal value has received
considerable attention in the social cognitive literature
regarding behavioral priming, the effect of expectancy
and the multiplicative effect of expectancy and value has
been relatively underinvestigated. However, there have
been some noteworthy exceptions. For example, Levy
(1996) subliminally primed old and young participants
with either positive elderly stereotypic words (e.g., wisdom) or negative elderly stereotypic words (e.g., senility).
Memory performance was assessed both before and after
priming. Assimilation effects occurred for elderly participants (i.e., reduced performance after negative primes
and enhanced performance after positive primes) but not
for young participants. One possible explanation of these
results is that the primes contained expectations about
ones own performance as a member of the primed group
of the elderly. For an elderly participant, but not for a
young participant, a prime induced a corresponding
expectancy (i.e., to perform poorly when primed with
senility and to perform well when primed with wisdom;
cf. Steele & Aronson, 1995; for research showing that
stereotypic expectancies can decrease as well as enhance
performance, see Brown & Josephs, 1999; Seibt &
Frster, 2004; see reviews by Shapiro & Neuberg, in
press; Wheeler & Petty, 2001). Of importance, the lack of
a priming influence on younger participants may reflect
the fact that for this group the primes were irrelevantit
is reasonable to suggest that 20-year-old participants simply do not care about senile amnesia and thus the priming did not have any effect. In general, these findings may
be interpreted as suggesting that expectancies can be activated unconsciously and influence overt performance if
they are relevant to the self.
Frster et al. (2005) also have recently reported results
strongly suggesting that behavioral priming should
exhibit expectancy-based moderation. As discussed earlier, Frster et al. (2005) found that goal-related accessibility and postfulfillment inhibition were proportional to
the motivation to achieve a goal. Again, in their experiments, participants were instructed to search through a
presented series of pictures for a target combination
(glasses followed by scissors) and to report it to the
experimenter. As noted before, the results reflected
increased accessibility of goal-related words before the
combination was found and inhibition after the combination was found compared to a group of participants
that only watched the pictures without the goal to find
the target combination. Moreover, in some studies
(Frster et al., 2005, Experiments 4-6), the authors
manipulated the expectancy of achieving the goal (by
telling participants that the target combination was present in 90% of the cases vs. only in 5% of the cases), the
value of the goal (by telling participants that they would
223
receive 1.00 vs. only 0.05 for finding the combination), or both expectancy and value. The experiments
also included a no-goal, control group that merely saw
the pictures without the goal of finding the target combination. As predicted, accessibility of goal-related words
prior to fulfillment and inhibition after fulfillment were
found in the high-expectancy and high-value conditions
but not in the low-expectancy and low-value conditions.
The combination of high value and high expectancy
enhanced the effects. Therefore, the effects of expectancy
and value on goal-related accessibility and on postfulfillment inhibition were interactive (i.e., multiplicative) and
similar to the effects of expectancy and value on motivation (e.g., Atkinson, 1964; Fishbein & Ajzen, 1974;
Vroom, 1966). To the extent that behavioral priming
effects are engendered by accessible goals, these results
suggest that expectancies regarding goal attainment
should play a critical role in determining the occurrence
and magnitude of such effects.
In regard to previously discussed motivational principles, semantic priming is not expected to be sensitive
to the interaction of expectancy and value. For example,
the extent to which light semantically primes lamp
should not vary as a function of the interaction between
the desirability of turning on the light and the
expectancy (e.g., feasibility) of doing so. Theories of
semantic priming or procedural priming as well as the
perceptionbehavior link are silent with respect to the
interaction of expectancy and value.
Let us now turn to three more principles that have
been suggested as uniquely characteristic of cognitive representations of goals (Kruglanski et al., 2002), namely,
goal shielding, involvement of self-control processes, and
multi- and equifinality.
Goal-Priming Effects Involve Inhibition
of Conflicting Goals
While pursuing a goal, one may be sidetracked by
other goals. We have all experienced going to another
room to get a nail clipper (or wristwatch, glasses,
husband, etc.) and then forgetting about the original
goal and finding ourselves pursuing another goal (e.g.,
once in the kitchen, we might start emptying the dishwasher). This effect, which was recently attributed to
deficits in working memory (Baddeley, 2001; Kane &
Engle, 2003), can very generally be interpreted as a loss
of concentration or loss of ones focus on the original
goal. Alternative goals, which may be triggered by cues
both from the outside (e.g., the kitchen one went to
looking for the nail clipper) and from the inside (e.g.,
remembering an unfinished paper), can distract us
from pursuing the original goal. Very often, however,
we seem to pursue our goals to completion, despite the
224
distracting environment and our simultaneous engagement in many other pressing tasks. Obviously, in order
to enable successful completion of one goal, the selfregulatory system needs to put other simultaneously
active goals on hold. Could that system operate out of
awareness and automatically shift the priority of activated goals? Goal Systems Theory (GST; Kruglanski
et al., 2002; Shah, Kruglanski, & Friedman, 2002) provides a positive answer to that question.
According to GST, goals form a hierarchical network
with superordinate goals associatively linked to both
subordinate goals (i.e., means) as well as competing or
complementary superordinate goals. These networks
may or may not correspond, either partly or fully, to
semantic networks. For example, the goal of buying
groceries may be subordinate to a higher level goal of
preparing a party and superordinate to the means of
driving a car to the supermarket, but this would by no
means suggest that the semantic constructs of groceries, party, and car need be analogously linked
with one another, if at all. GST generates the prediction
that means should activate the goals they subserve and
that goals should activate the means that subserve them.
Indeed, Kruglanski et al. (2002) have shown, using subliminal priming, that lexical decision times for goalrelated means were faster after priming goals and lexical
decisions for goals were faster after means were primed.
Moreover, increased accessibility of the goal due to
priming of means was associated with increased task persistence and better performance (Shah & Kruglanski,
2003), reflecting the existence of a direct relationship
between success in goal pursuit and the strength of the
connection between means and goals.
Beyond these basic tenets, GST also predicts the existence of inhibitory links between competing goals, a
phenomenon labeled goal shielding. Goal shielding
occurs when mental representations of alternative
potentially competing goals are inhibited by the mere
activation of a focal goal. To demonstrate the existence
of this phenomenon, Shah, Friedman, and Kruglanski
(2002) subliminally primed participants with words
representing goals that they intended to pursue (e.g.,
studying, reading, running, skiing) in a lexical decision
paradigm. Specifically, following suboptimal exposure
to either these goal primes or control primes (e.g., representing goals they did not intend to pursue), participants were asked to make speeded responses to targets
that represented either competing goals or control
goals. As predicted, it was found that when goals were
primed, reaction times to competing goals were slowed,
relative to reaction times to control goals, suggesting
that the mere activation of a goal automatically suppresses the accessibility of goals that stand to interfere
with its pursuit. Critically, this shielding effect was only

obtained for primed goals to which participants were
highly committed and for which protection from interference would therefore be most imperative. Moreover,
when target stimuli represented goals that would not
stand to compete with focal goal attainment, the shielding effect was eradicated, again reflecting its presumed
functional utility in self-regulation.
Of most pertinence to the current discussion, as they
presently stand, models of semantic priming are incapable of accounting for inhibitory effects of this ilk. If
only semantic or associative priming were at play in the
paradigm devised by Shah and his colleagues, then the
subliminally primed, goal-related constructs (e.g., playing
football) should have, if anything, facilitated response
times to competing goal constructs (e.g., baseball) by dint
of shared semantic category membership or because both
prime and target goal constructs were associatively linked
by the very way of their competitive relationship.
Moreover, traditional spreading activation (as well as
connectionist) models would be hard-pressed to explain
why goal commitment enhanced the inhibition effect. It
might be argued that words representing committed goals
were more emotionally engrossing, thereby capturing
greater attention and slowing responses to target words.
However, this account would have difficulty explaining
why the shielding effect was reduced when targets represented goals that were noncompetitive with the focal
goal. Moreover, given the subliminal priming procedures
most prominently employed, it is unlikely that participants were distracted to an extent sufficient to reliably
retard their responses. Shah, Friedman, and Kruglanski
(2002) also soundly replicated the goal-shielding effect
using supraliminal primes, arguing against the possibility
that participants were slowed in their responses to target
stimuli by their attempts to discern the identities of the
masked goal primes.
Upon consideration, there are numerous instances of
inhibitory cognitive processing that may be seen as
involving suppression of cognitive material that stands
to interfere with goal-directed behavior. For instance,
in the area of psycholinguistics, it has been found that
homonyms initially activate all available semantic
meanings (e.g., the word bank activates both the meaning of a financial institution and the meaning of a
riverside). However, once a context is determined, the
context-irrelevant meanings become inhibited (Swinney,
Prather, & Love, 2000). Here, the inhibition that
ultimately results in such procedures may be seen as
crucial to satisfying the goal of semantically disambiguating the sentence at handto the extent that
alternative meanings were to remain accessible, confusion would linger.
Likewise, in the retrieval-induced, forgetting paradigm

(Anderson & Bjork, 1994), during a study phase, participants encode several categorized lists, each composed of
several exemplars in a categoryexemplar format (e.g.,
fruitorange). After the study phase, participants engage
in directed retrieval practice for half of the items from half
of the studied categories. In this phase, they complete
category-plus-exemplar stem cue tests (e.g., fruitor___).
After a retention interval, a final and unexpected
category-cued recall test is administered in which participants are cued with each category name and are asked to
reproduce any exemplar of that category that they remember from any point in the experiment. It is typically found
that performance on practiced items improves relative
to the baseline condition (i.e., items from unpracticed
categories), whereas performance on the unpracticed
items from practiced categories falls below this baseline.
Anderson and Bjork (1994) have explained these effects
by suggesting that during the retrieval practice phase, the
practiced items compete with the unpracticed items from
the same category and thus inhibit them (see also
Anderson & Neely, 1996; Anderson & Spellman, 1995).
Again, this may be reconstrued, in motivational terms, as
suggesting that material is cognitively suppressed that
stands to interfere with attaining the goal of retrieving the
practiced items.
However, it is also possible that phenomena of this
sort do not actually entail activation of mentally represented goals. Perceptual systems may simply be hardwired to inhibit information that stands to undermine
stable identification of a given percept. So, for instance,
upon encountering the homograph bank, when a particular interpretation is more probable, the brain suppresses
activation of less probable alternatives, irrespective of
whether any stimulus interpretation or word comprehension goal has been activated or has ever been
represented. A kindred example would be perception of
ambiguous figures such as the familiar Necker cube
the perceptual system simply uses available cues to compute the most likely configuration for the stimulus and
suppresses activation of information that would promote a conflicting perceptual organization. This process
may not, and to our knowledge has never been presumed to, entail activation of a mentally represented
goal to disambiguate the sensory image. Therefore,
although it is certainly possible that goal activation may
contribute to a wide variety of inhibitory phenomenon
for which motivational accounts have not previously
been invoked, the existence of said contribution remains
controversial and cries out for empirical scrutiny. As
such, for the sake of parsimony, we propose that inhibition of goal-incompatible material can only be confidently ascribed to goal priming when the mere
225
activation of a goal construct representing a desired end

state to which an individual is highly committed automatically shields itself via suppression of the accessibility of competing goal constructs.
Goal-Priming Effects Involve Self-Control
Implementation of many abstract, long-term goals
often is impeded by the necessity of overcoming concrete,
momentary temptations. For instance, individuals oftentimes are tempted to overeat when trying to maintain a
diet, watch TV when trying to read a paper, smoke when
attempting to quit, or more generally take a smaller but
sooner reward at the expense of a larger one later (Ainslie,
1992; Fujita, Trope, Liberman, & Levin-Sagi, 2006;
Loewenstein, 1996; Metcalfe & Mischel, 1999; Mischel,
1974; Mischel, Shoda, & Peake, 1988; Rachlin, 1995,
1996, 1997; Shoda, Mischel, & Peake, 1990; Trope &
Fishbach, 2000). Such self-control dilemmas may be
viewed as conflicts between the behavioral implications of
a low-level construal (specific, local view) of a situation
and the behavioral implications of a high-level (i.e., general, abstract) construal of a situation (Fujita et al., 2006).
Given this definition, goal shielding, as discussed
above, may be understood as a special case of selfcontrol inasmuch as the nonfocal, background goal may
be thought of as following from a lower level construal
of the situation than that following from the focal, primary goal (Trope & Liberman, 2000). In that sense, the
background goals or action tendencies may be conceptualized as temptations that one is trying to overcome to
pursue the more important, focal goal. Nevertheless, we
believe that self-control deserves some special attention
in view of its vital importance in peoples lives. Unlike
the more general case of distracting goals, which may be
imposed by situations and therefore unforeseeable (e.g.,
one does not know that the goal to get clippers from the
kitchen would be subverted by a competing goal to have
a cup of coffee), classic self-control situations tend to
involve a specific distracting goal that may be known in
advance. For example, people know that their attempts
to diet could be sabotaged by a dessert in a restaurant
or that TV interferes with studying or that fear and laziness might prevent them from getting an HIV test.
Knowing in advance the specific impediment to goal
attainment allows people to preemptively employ selfcontrol strategies that aim at counteracting the potential
temptations. A person might try to eliminate the temptations, to detract from their attractiveness, or to bolster the
attractiveness of the higher level goal (Fishbach &
Trope, 2001). For example, research shows that people
may impose on themselves penalties for failing to act
according to their long-term outcomes (Ainslie, 1975;
226
Becker, 1960). These self-imposed penalties may then

serve as deterrents against failure to act according to the
higher level goal. People also may opt to change future
choice situations by making rewards contingent on acting according to ones long-term interests. Thus, instead
of receiving a reward unconditionally, people may prefer to receive it only if they act according to their longterm interests. For example, one may prefer to receive a
bonus for actually completing an HIV test than for
merely agreeing to do it. In making penalties and
rewards contingent on performing an activity, people
precommit themselves to the higher level goal
(Brickman, 1987), often making their decision to act
according to their higher level goals irreversible (Ainslie,
1975; Green & Rachlin, 1996; Rachlin & Green, 1972;
Schelling, 1978; Strotz, 1956; Thaler, 1994; Thaler &
Shefrin, 1981). Other self-control strategies involve bolstering the value of the higher level goals (Mischel,
1984), for example, by linking their attainment to
important self-standards. Failure to choose according to
long-term outcomes is then construed as a violation of
ones central values and a threat to ones sense of selfworth and self-determination.
It seems that most of these strategies involve conscious processes. Moreover, research on ego-depletion
has demonstrated that self-control takes up extensive
cognitive resources and, in that sense, cannot be automatic. Indeed, self-control decreases as a function of
fatigue, concurrent activities, and negative affect
(Baumeister, Bratslavsky, Muraven, & Tice, 1998;
Muraven, Tice, & Baumeister, 1998; see also Fishbach
& Trope, 2001). It is still possible, however, that some
of these self-control strategies would operate in an
unconscious manner. Could self-control processes come
into play in the activation and inhibition of goal representations and thereby in automatic behavioral priming? Could self-control strategies themselves be
activated outside of awareness?
Recent research by Fishbach, Friedman, and Kruglanski
(2003) provides a positive answer to both of these questions. Based on GST, Fishbach et al. (2003) argued that
when situationally enticed to pursue short-term goals
representing temptations (e.g., use of illegal drugs,
engagement in premarital sex), people activate superordinate goals (e.g., academic achievement, adhering to
religious mores) to aid self-control. To test their hypothesis, the authors subliminally primed temptation-related
words (e.g., drugs, sex) and found that participants
were significantly faster to make lexical decisions about
words related to the higher order goals with which these
temptations stood to interfere (e.g., grades, bible) than
when primed with control words associated with temptations that were irrelevant to these goals. Attesting to
the automaticity (in this case, efficiency; see Bargh,
1994) of the effect, temptationgoal activation also was

shown to occur under high cognitive load and when the
stimulus onset asynchrony (the delay between prime
and target presentation) was set at merely 67 ms,
decreasing the likelihood that controlled processing
could take place.
Critically, Fishbach et al. (2003) took pains to
demonstrate that their effect was self-regulatory in
nature. First, they showed that whereas temptation
primes facilitated goal response times, suggesting that
momentary allurements automatically trigger activation
of overriding goals, goal primes were, if anything, found
in the same designs to inhibit activation of temptations
(thereby pointing to a goal-shielding process; Shah,
Friedman, & Kruglanski, 2002). The discovery of this
crossover pattern, which appears functional for selfcontrol, suggests that cognitive links between temptation and overriding goal representations are forged
during the course of practice in self-regulation. If
Fishbach et al. (2003) had, for instance, found an ordinal interaction, with temptations rapidly activating
goals and goals less rapidly activating temptations, their
effect may have been accounted for without any invocation of motivational processes. For example, they
might have posited that temptations and the goals with
which they interfere are hierarchically linked with
numerous low-level or concrete temptations associated
with a given high-level or abstract goal. At least with
regard to semantic associations of this hierarchical
nature, it has been argued that the higher level representations should facilitate the lower level representations to a lesser extent than vice versa (e.g., robin
primes bird faster than bird primes robina
fan effect; Anderson, 1976, 1983); however, given
that Fishbach et al. (2003) found not only diminished
facilitation but inhibition of temptations by goals, this
nonmotivational account was rendered comparatively
unparsimonious (i.e., certainly bird shouldnt inhibit
robin the way goals inhibit temptations). Beyond
this, Fishbach et al. (2003) also demonstrated that
temptationgoal activation was facilitated by increased
commitment to the overriding goal and increased
expectancy of self-regulatory success, two critical motivational variables. Altogether, their work (for an
example of automatic self-control regarding stereotyping, see also Moskowitz et al., 1999) strongly suggests
that automatic processes in resisting temptation,
processes that are adaptive for self-regulation, may be
endemic to goal systems but may not function within
representational networks based solely on semantic or
temporal associations. As such, documentation of the
operation of such processes may provide yet another
means of distinguishing automatic goal-priming effects
from effects that do not involve goals.
Goal-Priming Effects Are Moderated by Equifinality

and Multifinality
Sometimes, an individual may have multiple means
of achieving the same goal. For example, it is possible to
get to work by taxi, bus, or bike. This is a case of what
has been termed equifinality (Kruglanski et al., 2002;
Shah, Friedman, & Kruglanski, 2002). It is also possible that the same means serves more than one goal: One
can ride a bike for transportation, exercise, or entertainment. This is the case of multifinality. As discussed above, GST predicts that goals and means are
linked and that one can elicit the other. It also predicts
that the extent to which a goal activates a given means
is inversely related to the number of means that are connected to that goal. Likewise, it is predicted that the
extent to which a means activates a goal is inversely
related to the number of goals that are connected to that
means. Equifinality and multifinality may vary across
situations. For example, our diet may be more restricted
when we are sick than when we are healthy, and the
concept eat would activate more foods in the latter
than in the former case. As another example of crosscontextual variation, during the weekend, biking may
more strongly activate fun than on a weekday, when
a bicycle also is likely to be used to drive to work.
To assess their predictions, Kruglanski and his colleagues (2002) have frequently employed modified
sequential priming paradigms. For instance, in one
study, they asked participants to list three personal
attributes that represented goals they wanted to attain
and one possible attribute that represented a goal they
currently were not trying to attain. Participants also
were asked to list one activity they could perform to
attain each of the four attributes, representing possible
means to attain the goals. They were then asked to list
all the activities they could think of that would help
them to attain each of the goals. Finally, participants
worked on a lexical decision task in which they were
asked to determine whether a word was a goal
(attribute) or a means (activity). The four goals listed by
the participant and the first means listed for each goal
were randomly included in the presented set of prime
and target words. Links for each attribute could then be
assessed by examining reaction times when the goal was
the prime for the means. First, the study showed that
accessibility of means was higher when goals were
primed compared to when non-goals were primed. Note
that in itself, this result could reflect both purely semantic associations as well as goal activation. However, the
results further showed that this goal-priming effect disappeared when the primed goal was one that participants were not currently pursuing, that is, when it was
available in long-term memory but when commitment
227
to the goal was minimal. This commitment- or valuebased moderation implicates the operation of selfregulatory processes (as suggested by the current
principle 1). Finally, in line with the equifinality-related
predictions of goal network theory, data from the same
study also revealed that the lower the number of activities participants listed or, in other words, the greater the
uniqueness of the goalmeans connection (i.e., the less
equifinality it possessed), the more accessible was the
first means listed (as indicated by speeded lexical decision time) after it was primed with the corresponding
goal. It would be difficult to account for such structural
effects on construct accessibility without positing the
existence of a separate network of goal representations
linked to one another in a manner that is functional for
self-regulation.
With regard to our current analysis, a particularly
interesting implication of goal network theory is that
multiple goals can work in the background with little or
no conscious awareness. Kruglanski et al. (2002) argue
that in multifinal goal structures, where a given means
subserves multiple goals, this state of affairs sometimes
leads to cases in which actions are misattributed to a
focal goal (i.e., one of which the individual is aware)
when they were in fact driven by unconscious background goals that could be attained using the same
means.
For instance, in one recent study by Chun,
Kruglanski, Sleeth-Kepller, & Friedman (under review)
participants were presented with an array of four pairs
of identical athletic socks labeled A, B, C, and
D from left to right and were provided with the focal
goal of choosing the one that seemed to be of the best
quality (cf. Nisbett & Wilson, 1977). To create a fairly
surreptitious background goal, participants in one condition were placed under time pressure, engendering the
secondary objective of reaching quick closure on their
decision. In a second condition, participants were given
accuracy instructions to reduce their need for closure
(see Kruglanski & Webster, 1996). It was found that
participants in whom a need for closure was instilled
demonstrated a relatively pronounced tendency to select
one of the pairs of socks they had most recently examined (here, the rightmost socks in the array), as would
be expected given the motive to quickly reach a decision. No such tendency was found among those in
whom a need to avoid closure had been instilled.
However, when carefully asked, participants, who
again were assigned the focal goal of choosing based on
quality alone, seemed entirely unaware that they had
been influenced by the time pressure or accuracy
instructions. Rather, even though they reported the reason(s) for their selection under conditions of anonymity
and confidentiality, they wholly justified their choices
228
using quality-related arguments (e.g., [the rightmost

pair] appeared more durable; the material was
thicker in the padding). These findings suggest that the
need for or against closure operated largely, if not
entirely, out of the participants awareness, influencing
participants choices when the behavioral options at
hand allowed them to fulfill their implicit background
goals using the same multifinal means that would satisfy their conscious focal goal. In essence, active background goals fairly automatically altered the value of a
multifinal behavioral option, thereby influencing action
in a manner that was not privy to conscious awareness.
Critically, models of semantic or procedural priming are
yet again silent regarding how explicit and latent
motives might interact to shape decision making in this
fashion.
Equifinality is related to another important characteristic of the goal system, which is the ability to engage
in means substitution. When an action fails, people typically seek alternative, equifinal means to satisfy the
same superordinate goal. For example, if a taxi did not
arrive to take me to the airport, I might seek alternative
ways to get there and take my car. Note that such alternative means could have been inhibited prior to the
failure of the initial means (i.e., before the taxi failed to
arrive, I could have inhibited driving my own car) but a
failure of one route could disinhibit the formerly inhibited means. To the best of our knowledge, means substitution and disinhibition of formerly inhibited means
have never been demonstrated with accessibility measures or with automatic goals. However, we argue that
if observed, such effects would constitute another difference between goal activation and semantic priming.
A semantic system would not explain why a situational
change in affordances (e.g., the failure of a taxi to
arrive) disinhibited an alternative means (e.g., driving
my own car).
CONCLUSION
In this article, we suggested seven principles that we
believe constitute hallmarks of human self-regulation
and thus may help to distinguish between semantic
priming and goal priming. We by no means suggest that
these principles are exhaustive, and we do not consider
their boundaries to be clear. Some principles may
include aspects of others, and some processes that have
been subsumed within one principle may overlap with
processes primarily associated with another. Many of
them have been discussed in recent work on goal pursuit (Bargh et al., 2001; Moskowitz et al., 2004;
Wheeler & Petty, 2001), and we thought it important to
integrate them and discuss them more fully with regard
to their implications for social psychological research

on goal priming. We believe that these are important
principles that might serve as guidelines for deciding
whether a given priming effect did or did not involve
goal-based mediation. They also might provide a platform for further discussions on automatic goal pursuit,
a phenomenon that is still quite controversial (see
Moskowitz et al., 2004; Strack & Deutsch, 2004).
We believe that without empirical markers, such as
the ones implied in this article, any claims regarding
goal versus semantic priming will remain a matter of
theoretical taste. As a matter of fact, without such principles, theoretical interpretations in terms of automatic
goal pursuit will remain nonfalsifiable. Thus, even
though alternative principles could be proposed and
even though automatic and controlled goal pursuit may
differ with regard to some of the proposed principles
(see our discussion on this issue below), theoretical
commitment to any such principles is still a necessary
precondition for scientifically sound research on automatic goal pursuit.
We hasten to add that the principles are sufficient but
not necessary conditions for inferring primed goals. In
other words, if borne out empirically, the phenomena
outlined in our principles would strongly suggest a
primed goal. Not finding them, however, does not
exclude the possibility of a primed goal. For example,
suppose that we find that the value of neighbor
changes from neutral to positive and back to neutral
with the activation and fulfillment of the goal to assemble furniture because the only way to fulfill the goal is
to borrow a screwdriver from the neighbor. We can
then conclude that a goal has been primed. However, a
failure to find such an effect would not allow us to infer
the absence of a primed goal.
What do these principles have in common? In other
words, what is it about goal activation that distinguishes it from activation of semantic constructs? We
have taken a very broad perspective in attempting to
answer this question, suggesting that goals follow an
instrumental logic rather than an associative or semantic logic. Furthermore, we would like to suggest that
there are two major components to instrumentality:
instrumental allocation of resources and instrumental
relations. Let us discuss these in turn.
Instrumental allocation of resources. Goals and
needs involve resource mobilization, spending energy to
achieve something that is important to people, something about which people care. Related to this notion is
the idea that the intensity of goal pursuit and the phenomena that derive from it, such as accessibility of goalrelated constructs and the value of the means, change
with the subjective attractiveness or importance of goal
attainment (goal value), with its expectancy, and with

their interaction (principles 1 and 4). As a result of
these, it also changes as a function of distance to the
goal and after goal attainment (principle 3).
Instrumental value refers to value for goal attainment
as opposed to other sources of value (e.g., beauty). A
primed goal would enhance the value of instrumental
means even if these are not otherwise associated to it.
Furthermore, a goal prime would enhance the value of
instrumental means prior to attainment but not after
attainment. For example, we could predict that if a
person is primed with success at a conference, then
her portable disk will become more valuable to her, but
no such effect occurs outside of the conference context.
Similar effects should be predicted for the accessibility
of constructs that are related to the talk (for a related
point, see Wheeler et al., in press). We also could predict that after the talk is over, both value of means and
accessibility of goal-related constructs would decrease
(principles 1 and 2).
Instrumental relations between goals. Principles 5, 6,
and 7 reflect the instrumental relations between goals,
relations that form a network composed of hierarchies
of subordinate and superordinate goals, a network that
may or may not correspond to associative or semantic
networks. Goals inhibit conflicting goals. Conflict may
arise between goals with no a priori relationship but
that potentially compete for resources, thereby giving
rise to inhibition of nonfocal goals (e.g., inhibition of
the goal of cooking when writing a review; principle 5).
Conflict also may arise between a higher level and a
lower level goal, as is the case in self-control dilemmas
(principle 6). Goals facilitate hierarchically linked subordinate and superordinate goals, that is, mental representations of means and ends facilitate each other
(principle 7). Goal hierarchies only partially reflect the
associative (or, for that matter, semantic) network. For
example, the fact that diet is connected to chocolate possibly reflects both a cold cognitive association
as well as a goalnetwork relation (i.e., between a
higher level goal and a temptation). However, if
study is connected to niece because on a particular
day playing with my baby niece is the primary distracter
that prevents me from studying, then an associative
explanation is less likely.
Automatic and Controlled Goal Pursuit
Another interesting question is whether conscious and
unconscious goal pursuit follow the same mechanisms.
Our analysis rests on the assumption that they are similar
with respect to the basic processes that are reflected in our
principles. Indeed, many of the principles we outlined
229
were demonstrated with automatic goals. However, other

views are possible. For example, research on implicit versus explicit attitude measures has shown that they may
reflect quite different psychological processes (see, e.g.,
Gawronski & Bodenhausen, 2006). Future research may
uncover differences between automatic and controlled
goal pursuit not only with respect to whether any of the
principles we outlined applies to them but also with
respect to the extent and scope of such application. For
example, it may be interesting to examine whether inhibition of goal-related constructs is stronger after conscious
rather than unconscious goal attainment. It also may be
interesting to investigate whether discrepancies between
actual and desired states can be induced unconsciously or,
rather, need to be experienced consciously to trigger goaldirected activity. Finally, it might be the case that conscious goals, but not primed goals, cause value to change
in the course of goal activation and goal attainment. This
would imply that some primed goals would not show the
pattern of value change described in our first principle.
In conclusion, a great many issues remain to be
empirically addressed with respect to the differentiation
of goals from other mental representations as well as
regarding the dynamics of goal activation and pursuit.
Clearly, many of the lines of research we have marshaled in support of our provisional criteria for the
identification of goal-priming effects remain in their
infancy. As new discoveries emerge, the seven principles
at hand will undoubtedly have to be amended and novel
principles devised to more adequately represent the
inner workings of the breathtakingly complex yet hitherto underexplored goal-representation systems that
ultimately shape human action.
NOTES
1. An alternative, nonmotivational account is that activated concepts influence the interpretation of ambiguous cues (e.g., the prime
aggression promotes interpretations of ambiguous behavior as
aggressive, which in turn leads to aggressive responses; see Wheeler &
Petty, 2001). We will withhold comprehensive discussion of it because
it does not apply to most of the effects on which our principles bear.
2. All of the priming phenomena discussed at present entail unintentional activation of goals and, as such, always reflect some modicum of automaticity. In some of the studies we discuss, other
processes involved in goal pursuit also may be automatic (Bargh,
1994), specifically, goal pursuit and even goal attainment may be efficient (i.e., may be carried out under cognitive load or distraction) or
unconscious (i.e., participants do not know that they are pursuing a
goal or that they have attained it).
3. Some researchers assume a chronically active interpretation
goal. We would not discuss this possibility, however, because we do
not think that such a chronic, ever-active goal possesses the characteristics of goals, which typically undergo activation, fulfillment, and
inhibition after fulfillment. For example, it would be uninformative to
suggest that people are constantly in the state of misunderstanding
and that their need to interpret is never satisfied. Of course, an interpretation goal may be activated, frustrated, and satisfied, but it is not
informative to assume that it is always present.
230
4. Notably, this change of value is implied in Wheeler, DeMarree,

and Pettys (in press) notion of active selves. A persons active self (as
opposed to the chronic, stable self) is a part of the self-concept that is
highly accessible in the situation. For example, a Buddhist driving a
Harley Davidson may have an aggressive self-concept rendered more
accessible when driving a Harley than when entering a temple. Such
changes in the self can further determine which motivational or behavioral representations will guide behavior. We add to this notion the goal
relevance. For example, the Buddhist may find peaceful means of
behavior more goal relevant in a temple than when driving a Harley and
thus may more readily activate peaceful thoughts and behavior in the
temple because the latter stands to facilitate the goal at hand.
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7 Principles of Goal-Based Priming

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Seven Principles of Goal Activation:

A Systematic Approach to Distinguishing

goal priming; semantic priming; procedural

moderated by self-regulatory processes (see, e.g.,

PERSONALITY AND SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY REVIEW

Shah & Kruglanski, 2002) have challenged the field,

of the notion that goals are automatically activated, the

EVIDENCE FOR AUTOMATIC GOAL

Frster et al. / GOAL AND NON-GOAL PRIMING

Assimilation effects have not only been shown to alter

WHY DOES PRIMING AFFECT

PERSONALITY AND SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY REVIEW

SEMANTIC PRIMING, PROCEDURAL PRIMING,

example, it is difficult to see how goals might be

Frster et al. / GOAL AND NON-GOAL PRIMING

to choose the matching trait (e.g., hostile). Inferring traits

accessible (interrupting vs. waiting and suffering)? It is

SEVEN PRINCIPLES OF GOAL ACTIVATION

PERSONALITY AND SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY REVIEW

1. Goal-priming effects involve value.

We now turn to discussing these principles and how they

furniture activated the goal to assemble furniture,

Frster et al. / GOAL AND NON-GOAL PRIMING

It is also useful to note that instrumental value

awareness. Thus, if people are happy or disappointed

PERSONALITY AND SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY REVIEW

participants were primed with a significant other that

Frster et al. / GOAL AND NON-GOAL PRIMING

with group membership has been experimentally

In a series of studies, participants looked through a series

PERSONALITY AND SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY REVIEW

accessibility to consciousness even after goal fulfillment

related to aggression and thus renders aggressive content

Frster et al. / GOAL AND NON-GOAL PRIMING

found the combination of scissors and glasses before

PERSONALITY AND SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY REVIEW

Srull and Wyer (1979) asked participants to judge an

It suggests that the positive value of some events (e.g.,

Frster et al. / GOAL AND NON-GOAL PRIMING

Despite its central conceptual role in earlier work on

PERSONALITY AND SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY REVIEW

with its pursuit. Critically, this shielding effect was only

Frster et al. / GOAL AND NON-GOAL PRIMING

Likewise, in the retrieval-induced, forgetting paradigm

activation of a goal construct representing a desired end

PERSONALITY AND SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY REVIEW

Becker, 1960). These self-imposed penalties may then

1994) of the effect, temptationgoal activation also was

Frster et al. / GOAL AND NON-GOAL PRIMING

Goal-Priming Effects Are Moderated by Equifinality

PERSONALITY AND SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY REVIEW

using quality-related arguments (e.g., [the rightmost

to their implications for social psychological research

Frster et al. / GOAL AND NON-GOAL PRIMING

attainment (goal value), with its expectancy, and with

were demonstrated with automatic goals. However, other

PERSONALITY AND SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY REVIEW

4. Notably, this change of value is implied in Wheeler, DeMarree,

Frster et al. / GOAL AND NON-GOAL PRIMING

Edwards, W. (1951). Probability preference among bets with differing

Fujita, K., Trope, Y., Liberman, N., & Levin-Sagi, M. (2006).

PERSONALITY AND SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY REVIEW

Miller, N. E., & Murray, E. J. (1952). Displacement and conflict: