I’ll take the high road: Paths to goal pursuit and identity-based interpretations of difficulty

ABSTRACT

When imagining their futures, people can prioritize getting there the easy way, prefer more demanding paths, or be indifferent to means and focus only on making progress. Identity-based motivation theory predicts and mixed effect regressions reveal that what people infer about themselves when facing unchosen life difficulties and when thinking about or working on goals feels hard shapes action (N = 537 undergraduates, three studies). To varying degrees, they can infer that unchosen life difficulties build character (difficulty-as-improvement), that chosen goals are really not for them (difficulty-as-impossibility), and that chosen goals are valuable for them (difficulty-as-importance). The more people endorse difficulty-as-impossibility, the more they choose ease. The more they endorse difficulty-as-improvement the more they disdain ease and prefer the effortful way.

KEYWORDS:

• means-ends
• identity-based motivation theory
• academic goals
• health goals
• difficulty mindsets and possible selves

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplementary data

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/15298868.2024.2314920.

Notes

1. For specifics, see our pre-registration documents at https://osf.io/u7dbm/?view_only=235c171b61a842ff989f292bfcb995c0.

2. Goals may be gender-linked (Benau et al., 2019) so we pre-registered exploratory analyses asking if experience with weight goals or being a woman moderates effects (see Supplemental Materials for questions and analyses). Weight goal salience did not moderate any of our significant relationships. We were underpowered to run moderation analyses with gender. We describe these results in Supplemental Materials, Results, and Supplemental Analyses sections.

3. The less parsimonious but preregistered analyses are reported in Supplemental Materials.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the John Templeton Foundation [61083].