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When your goals inspire my goals: the role of effort, personal value, and inference in goal contagion.

ABSTRACT: Just observing other people can influence what we do. Under certain conditions, it inspires us to strive for the same goal as the other person. Such goal contagion occurs, because one first automatically infers the goal and then adopts it for oneself. In a series of three experiments (overall N = 840 university students), we investigated personal goal value and the observed person's effort as moderators of goal contagion, which is mediated by goal inference. In all three experiments, participants read a brief story about a student who either wants to earn money (target goal) or to do an internship (control) and expects to show much or little effort. In Studies 1a and b, goal inference was the dependent variable, whereas in Study 2, we considered the full moderated-mediation model and measured how strongly participants pursue the goal to earn money. We aimed at locating the moderators within this two-step process. We hypothesized that high effort increases goal inference, whereas personal goal value strengthens the relationship between goal inference and goal adoption. Across experiments, we did find evidence for explicit and spontaneous, but not for implicit goal inference. Furthermore, participants did not pursue to earn money to a different degree across conditions and different degrees of goal value. Taken together, neither the moderated-mediation process nor the basic goal contagion effect was supported. Results are discussed in the light of other published studies on goal contagion and the current Replication Crisis.

SUBMITTER: Corcoran K

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7909217 | biostudies-literature |

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Project description:Distracted eating can lead to increased food intake, but it is unclear how. We aimed to assess how distraction affects motivated, goal-directed responses for food reward after satiation. Thirty-eight healthy normal-weight participants (28F; 10M) performed a visual detection task varying in attentional load (high vs. low distraction) during fMRI. Simultaneously, they exerted effort for sweet and savory food rewards by repeated button presses. Two fMRI runs were separated by sensory-specific satiation (outcome devaluation) of one of the (sweet or savory) reward outcomes, to assess outcome-sensitive, goal-directed, responses (valued vs. devalued reward, post vs. pre satiation). We could not verify our primary hypothesis that more distraction leads to less activation in ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) during goal-directed effort. Behaviorally, distraction also did not affect effort for food reward following satiation across subjects. For our secondary hypothesis, we assessed whether distraction affected other fronto-striatal regions during goal-directed effort. We did not obtain such effects at our whole-brain corrected threshold, but at an exploratory uncorrected threshold (p?<?0.001), distraction decreased goal-directed responses (devalued vs. valued) in the right inferior frontal gyrus (rIFG). We continued with this rIFG region for the next secondary hypothesis; specifically, that distraction would reduce functional connectivity with the fronto-striatal regions found in the previous analyses. Indeed, distraction decreased functional connectivity between the rIFG and left putamen for valued versus devalued food rewards (pFWE(cluster)?<?0.05). In an exploratory brain-behavior analysis, we showed that distraction-sensitive rIFG-responses correlated negatively (r?=?- 0.40; p?=?0.014) with the effect of distraction on effort. Specifically, decreased distraction-related rIFG-responses were associated with increased effort for food reward after satiation. We discuss the absence of distraction effects on goal-directed responses in vmPFC and in behavior across participants. Moreover, based on our significant functional connectivity and brain-behavior results, we suggest that distraction might attenuate the ability to inhibit responses for food reward after satiation by affecting the rIFG and its connection to the putamen.

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When your goals inspire my goals: the role of effort, personal value, and inference in goal contagion.

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