Exploring goal change in everyday life
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Research on goal pursuit often assumes goals remain stable. Yet goal pursuit is a dynamic process where goals and perceptions of them can change, of which our understanding is limited. Past research has mostly focused on the role of performance and negative feedback in laboratory or experimental studies. We investigate what predicts goal change and how goals change over time in everyday life. Participants ( N = 420 North American undergraduate students; 75% female) reported on two goals biweekly for three months ( n = 1505 follow-up observations). People changed goals on 5.4% of occasions, although 27.38% of participants changed goals at least once over three months. Other (non-academic) goals were changed more frequently than academic goals. Multilevel models revealed commitment, goal progress, time, and stress predicted goal change. People were less likely to change goals later in the study and when they were highly committed, but more likely to change goals when they made very little or a lot of progress (quadratic effect), and when they experienced greater stress. Whether they changed or kept their goals, their perceptions of goal difficulty, commitment, and self-efficacy changed over time. We discuss implications of such changes for theories and research on personal goal pursuit.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".