The Goal-dependent
Inferences
of Other People’s Goals
Sam Goos01-11-2017
Programmagroep Sociale Psychologie Student number: 10375813
University of Amsterdam Supervisor: dr. G. Dik
2
“Deciding what not to do, is as important as deciding what to do.”
3 Abstract
When we observe the behavior of other people, we are able to infer which goal they pursue. Work by Hassin et al. (2005) suggests that these goal inferences occur automatically.
However, we propose that goal inferences are spontaneous rather than automatic, as multiple moderators have been identified that undermine the notion that goal inferences are automatic by definition. Having a current goal is one possible factor that could affect the inference of others’ goals, and this factor has not yet been examined as a moderator. In an attempt to incorporate the goal inference phenomenon into the goal shielding literature, we have investigated whether having a salient focal goal influences the inference of goals from other people’s behaviors. We expected that our results would reveal that people do infer goals, but that this inference is weakened when the goal of another person conflicts with one’s own salient focal goal. The results replicate the findings of Hassin et al. (2005) that people make goal inferences; however, we found no moderating impact of goal shielding. Implications of these findings are discussed, together with the study’s shortcomings. Recommendations for future research are given.
4 The Goal-dependent Inference of Other People’s Goals
When we observe the behavior of other people, we are able to infer which goal they are pursuing without this information being explicitly expressed. In this case, goals are defined as desired end states which a person wants to achieve (Kruglanski et al., 2002). For example, when an individual observes another person in the supermarket buying multiple crates of beer the former would probably come to the conclusion that this person is going to organize a party. Similarly, encountering a fellow student who is rehearsing a speech in the toilet would most certainly lead to the inference that this student has to give a presentation in the coming hours. Arriving at these conclusions does not require in-depth and deliberate thinking, rather they are made more or less spontaneously.
To obtain evidence for this mechanism, Hassin, Aarts and Ferguson (2005a) examined whether people make inferences about others’ goals when they are exposed to the behavior of these individuals. In their study, participants were asked to read either scenarios that described people’s goal-directed behavior or those that did not include any specified intentions. The goals were never mentioned explicitly in either scenario, but they were inferable from the specified behavior. After a short delay, participants were asked to recall the scenarios as accurately as possible. While doing so, they were presented with a cue that either represented the specific goal word or another meaningless word that was in the
scenario. The results revealed that participants recalled goal-scenarios better when presented with goal-cues than when presented with control-, i.e. not goal-directed, cues. For example, the scenario ‘The student is riding his bicycle to the university as fast as he can’ was
remembered better by participants when presented with the cue ‘attend lecture’ than when presented with the cue ‘riding.' The authors concluded that the participants had inferred the goals and that this had led to a superior recall of the sentences implying the goal.
5 Hassin et al. (2005) used the term ‘automatic’ to describe the inference of the goals of someone else. According to Bargh (1994), a process is automatic when the
individual undergoing the process meets the following four criteria: 1) s/he is unaware of the process itself; 2) s/he does not have any intention to undergo the process; 3) s/he does not have control over the process and 4) the process takes a minimal amount of cognitive resources. If a process is to be considered automatic, verification that it meets these four criteria is required. The aim of study reported here was to test our proposal that the inference of goals from others does not meet these criteria and can therefore not be defined as
automatic. We base this proposal on the following argumentation.
Firstly, based on the study of Hassin et al. (2005) it is not possible to verify whether goal inferences are truly automatic. As these authors did not include any tests in their study that measured the components of automatism, it is impossible to ascertain whether the four aforementioned criteria were met. How is it possible to determine whether goal inferences are uncontrollable if the controllability of the goal inferences was not tested? How is it possible to determine that inferring goals takes a minimal amount of cognitive resources if the resources participants needed were not measured? The answer is very simple: it is not possible.
Secondly, goal inferences are not likely to be automatic because multiple moderators have been identified that influence the motivation to infer goals and, consequently, change the likelihood that individuals make inferences (Mozkowits & Okten, 2016). People are, for example, more motivated to infer goals from others when these others expend great effort to pursue their goal (Dik & Aarts, 2007; 2008), when the goal-directed behavior is displayed by a partner (Shah, 2003) or someone belonging to the same social group as the individual inferring the goal (Loersch, Aarts, Payne & Jefferis, 2008). If motivation can influence the
6 process of inferring goals, the latter is not completely automatic according to the definition, which states that the process cannot be controlled.
Therefore, we prefer to use the term spontaneous rather than automatic. The definition of spontaneity only covers unintentionality: as such, people make goal inferences without an explicit intention or without instructions to do so (Hassin, Bargh & Uleman, 2002).
Goals as Moderators of Goal Inferences
While multiple moderating variables have been examined in the current literature, much remains unknown regarding goal inferences under different circumstances. One possible moderator of the inference of goals from other people’s behavior is/are the specific goal/s of the people making the inference/s.
Our goals shape the way we perceive reality. An individual achieves his/her goal by focusing on environmental stimuli that promote pursuit of the current goal, while concomitantly ignoring information that may interfere with the process of reaching the goal (Dijksterhuis & Aarts, 2010). For example, participants in the study of Vogt et al. (2010) paid more attention to cues that were relevant to their current goals than to neutral cues. Because the cognitive capacity of any one person is limited, focusing attention on goal-relevant cues implies that less attention can be paid to cues that are less relevant (Vogt, De Houwer & Crombez, 2011).
That the goals of others’ fall within the range of stimuli that are potentially relevant to one’s own goals is shown by research on ‘goal contagion.’ When the personal desire of an individual is in line with someone else’s goal, the former tends to adopt that goal and will also start to engage in behavior that will facilitate personal achievement of that same goal (Aarts, Gollwitzer & Hassin, 2004). For example, in the study of Aarts et al. (2004a),
7 they had observed someone else pursuing the same goal. These findings serve as evidence that the goals of others can unintentionally influence one’s own behavior.
Since people are selective in terms of the attention they pay to various environmental stimuli dependent on their goals and given that these stimuli can become the goals of others, it is very possible that making goal inferences is also a selective process. For example, if a student has a goal to succeed for an exam, s/he may be more likely to infer the goals of others that pursue the same goal, instead of others that pursue conflicting goals, like going to
parties.
While this reasoning suggests that goals affect goal inferences, there is no proof of the existence of this mechanism. One theory which possibly provides a basis for the premise that goal inferences are made in a goal-dependent context is the goal shielding theory (Kruglanski et al., 2002), which explains how motivation (goals) affects attentional resources. Strangely enough, this theory has never been examined within the framework of goal inferences. Therefore, here we attempt to integrate the two lines of research. First, however, it is necessary to explain how the goal shielding theory can take the goal-dependent inference hypothesis into account.
Goal Shielding Theory
Before a person pursues a specific goal, stored information related to that goal becomes mentally accessible in preparation for the engagement of behavior that is aimed at achieving the desired end state (Bargh et al., 2001). Because peoples’ cognitive capacity is limited, attentional resources must be preserved as much as possible for that goal to which the person is most committed, which then also prevents alternative goals acting as a
distraction to pull these resources away. Important goals to which people are more committed to than other goals are also referred to as focal goals. Accordingly, it would appear that people possess a self-regulating mechanism that enables the spontaneous shielding of focal
8 goals. Namely, mental accessibility to alternative goals is instantaneously inhibited upon activation of a focal goal (Shah, Friedman & Kruglanski, 2002). The more important the goal is, the stronger this effect will be. When a student is truly motivated to study for an exam (focal goal), mental information on studying becomes accessible and, conversely, mental information on conflicting goals – such as relaxing or having fun – becomes less accessible as a consequence of the activation of the focal goal.
This mechanism can be illustrated using a study conducted by Shah et al. (2002a). In this study, participants were asked to describe goals of high personal importance versus goals of low personal importance. When participants listed a goal, which they regarded as being highly important, they subsequently were less able to list alternative goals in comparison when they had first described a goal of low importance. In other words, the shielding of the highly important, focal goal resulted in inhibition of alternative goals. Complementary to these results, participants from another study (Shah et al., 2002d) were asked to list alternative goals that were either facilitative or conflicting to their focal goal. These researchers noted that after the participants had described a goal of high importance, they were less able to list alternative goals that were conflicting to the focal goal than they were to list facilitative goals. The underlying reasoning proposed by the authors is that because facilitative goals are less harmful – or even beneficial – to the pursuit of the focal goal, they were less inhibited than harmful, conflicting goals after shielding of the focal goal. From these studies, it can be concluded that activating a focal goal leads instantly to goal shielding, a process by which mental accessibility to alternative goals becomes inhibited in order to preserve attentional resources to a salient goal.
Salient mental information strongly affects the inferences people make of other people (Kawada et al., 2004, Wigoboldus, Dijksterhuis & Van Knippenberg, 2003), leading to the argument proposed here that that goal shielding will affect the inferences people make
9 regarding others’ goals. We propose that when a focal goal is salient, the inhibition of
alternative goal-related information may result in the obstruction of the mechanism to infer goals of others that are associated with this inhibited information. In this way, we attempt to establish a link between the goal-shielding research line and the phenomenon of goal
inferences.
The Present Study
The aim of this study is to examine whether activating a focal goal has a moderating impact on the inference of goals from others’ behaviors. This possibility is tested within an experimental survey design in which the salience of a focal goal is manipulated. A modified version of the surprise cued-recall paradigm of Hassin et al. (2005) is used to test goal inferences. In this task, participants read scenarios that describe goal-implying behaviors of others, following which they are asked to reproduce the scenes as accurately as possible. To facilitate recall, participants see cues that represent either the (implied) goal words or other words that were in the sentence. Better recall of the behavior when presented with a goal-cue than when presented with a repetition-cue is taken to indicate that participants have inferred a goal.
First, we hypothesize that people infer goals from specified behavior, whereby a main effect of type of cue on recall is expected. It is assumed that participants have higher recall scores when being presented with goal-cues than when presented with repetition-cues. This effect is expected to result from goal inferences and would replicate the findings of Hassin et al. (2005).
Second, a salient focal goal is expected to have a moderating effect on goal
inferences, whereby salience of a focal goal weakens the effect of cue type on recall, when the to be inferred goal represents a goal that conflicts with the focal goal. This hypothesis
10 extends the findings of Hassin et al. (2005) and Shah et al. (2002) by investigating the
process of goal shielding in making goal inferences. Method Participants
One hundred and twenty-three participants (26 male, 97 female) were enrolled in the study. The participants were all psychology undergraduates from the University of
Amsterdam (mean age: 19.92 years, SD = 2.26 years), who were recruited via the recruitment website of the university. All subjects received course credit for their participation and had a chance to win a gift certificate.
Design
A mixed factorial design was applied to test the hypotheses. Participants were randomly assigned to one of two conditions (Goal activation: Focal vs. Control), wherein a within-participants’ 2 (Scenario type: Focal goal vs. Alternative goal) x 2 (Cue type: goal-cue vs. repetition-cue) design was applied. All participants read the same (goal-implying)
scenarios. However, one-half of the (goal- vs. repetition-) cues were shown to one-half of the participants, while the other half of the participants saw the other half of the cues. The goal-scenarios and (goal- vs. repetition-) cues were presented randomly to control for possible order effects. All participants completed the experiment on a computer, in a self-chosen environment outside of a lab. All instructions were given via the computer.
Materials and Procedure
Pilot test. Prior to conducting this study, a pilot test was run to create valid goal-implying scenarios. A total of 20 scenarios were created, whereby half of them specified behavior that was directed to reaching academic achievement, and the other half described behavior that was directed to reach a socializing goal (see Appendix). These two different goals were chosen because they were assumed to be conflicting to each other, i.e., goal
11 shielding of academic achievement should strongly inhibit goal-related information of
socializing. The scenarios did not literally represent the goals of academic achievement or socializing, but they did represent goals that are facilitative to these superordinate goals (Shah & Kruglanski, 2002). For example, ‘Rick has not done enough in the last couple of
weeks, so he has to work all night to finish his assignment,' implied the goal of ‘getting a deadline,' which is facilitative to the goal of academic achievement.
In the pilot test, 57 participants were asked to rate scenarios on a 7-point Likert scale in terms of how well the goals of the behaviors described in the scenarios could be identified and whether the goal would lead to academic achievement. The results showed that
participants rated scenarios that were intended to imply study goals as being more as directed towards academic achievement (mean = 5.48, SD = 0.73, α = 0.81) than those intended to imply alternative goals (mean = 2.69, SD = 1.04, p < 0,001, α = 0,92). Qualitative analysis of the goals which participants thought the scenarios were implying was performed to obtain additional information to determine the suitability of the scenarios.
Focal goal manipulation. In this study, commitment to a focal goal was tested under two conditions. In the focal goal condition, the goal of studying was activated in the minds of the participants, while in the control condition no goal was activated. As such, participants from the focal goal condition were told at the beginning of the experiment that they were taking part in a research project that aimed to investigate motives for studying, while those in the control condition were told that they were participating in a study on attitudes regarding the separation of garbage. This latter topic was selected for the control condition because it was not expected to activate goals related to the task the participants would subsequently be asked to perform. Participants from the focal goal condition were then asked to read a short vignette about academic achievement based on a study from Fishbach and Dhar (2005), and participants from the control condition were asked to read a vignette on the separation of
12 garbage. Once the participants had completed reading the respective vignette, they were asked to write down three ways they usually use to achieve their academic goal (focal goal condition) or three positive consequences of separating waste (control condition). After that, they had a pause of 2 minutes.
Following the pause, participants were asked to rate the goal-implying scenarios on how interesting they found them on a 5-point scale ranging from ‘not interesting’ (1) to ‘interesting,' (5) based on Hassin et al. (2005a). Once the scenarios had been rated, a filler task was inserted in which participants were asked to rate 16 faces (Walker et al., 2017) on how interesting they found them; this step was based on the filler task used in Hassin et al. (2005a).
Surprise cued-recall task. Following completion of the filler task, goal inference – or not – was measured as the dependent variable by asking the participants to take part in a surprise cued-recall task (Hassin et al., 2005). In this task they were asked to recall the scenarios and to write down their recollections of what they had read as accurately and comprehensively as possible, while at the same time they were given a cue to help them recall the scenarios. The cue was either a goal-cue or a repetition-cue (taken literally from a sentence in the scenario). Two researchers subsequently analyzed the recalls, rating them on a scale from 0 (not accurate at all) to 3 (very accurate), with any disagreement in ratings
resolved by a third researcher. Cohen’s κ was run to determine whether there was agreement between the ratings of the two assessors on the recalls; a high agreement was found (κ = 0.838, p < 0.05).
Manipulation check. To determine whether the manipulation was successfully executed, participants filled in a questionnaire comprising three 7-point Likert-scale items (α = 0.72) that measured commitment to academic achievement. For example, one of the questions was ‘Reaching academic achievement is very important for me,’ whereby
13 participants could indicate to which extent the statement applied to them. The manipulation check was considered to be successful when participants from the focal goal condition were assessed to be more committed to reaching academic achievement than participants from the control condition, as result of their salient focal goal.
At the end of the study, the participants were thoroughly debriefed in terms of learning the real aim of the trials and then asked whether they at any time prior to or during the trials had any suspicion of the true purpose of the study. The aim underlying this question was to exclude from the analysis the data of any participant who had been aware of the true purpose; however, none of participants had been aware of the true purpose. Finally,
participants were given the opportunity to leave their email addresses so they could be
informed at a later date of the results of the investigation, as well as to have a chance to win a gift card.
Statistical analysis. The results were analyzed through a repeated measures factorial analysis of variance (ANOVA) in which recall score was the dependent variable. The
independent variables consisted of a between-factor condition (Focal goal vs. Control goal) two within-factor conditions, namely type of cue and type of scenario. The first hypothesis would be confirmed if there was a main effect of type of cue upon recall, whereby recall scores should be higher after the participant was presented with goal-cues rather than with repetition-cues. The second hypothesis would be confirmed when there was a significant interaction effect of condition, type of cue and type of scenario upon recall. For the focal goal condition, the effect of type of cue upon recall should be weakened when the scenarios imply alternative (socializing) goals, but not when the scenarios imply focal goals (academic achievement). All effects were statistically significant at the 0.05 significance level.
14 Exclusion criteria. For the final analysis, we calculated a mean score on both
recalling study goal-scenarios and recalling alternative goal-scenarios. After a reliability analysis, we excluded four scenarios from the analysis due to extremely low mean scores on recall (mean < 0.60). These low scores were, in conjunction with the results of the qualitative analysis of the recalled sentences, interpreted as indicating that the cues were either
insufficiently clear to elicit recall of the scenario or they were being confused with other scenarios. The excluded scenarios were focal scenarios 2 and 9, and alternative goal-scenarios 2 and 9 (see Appendix). Moreover, 16 participants did not recall any scenario, indicating that they had not read the scenarios at all, and their data were excluded from the analysis. Eventually, the results of 51 participants from the focal goal condition and 56 participants from the control condition were analyzed.
Manipulation check. As a first step, we conducted an independent t-test to assess whether the manipulation was successfully executed. The results showed that participants from the focal goal condition (mean = 5.33, SD = 0.83) had no higher commitment to academic achievement than their counterparts from the control condition (mean = 5.07, SD = 0.86); t(105) = 1.639, p = 0.104. These results indicate that the manipulation was not
executed successfully.
Main effects. A repeated measures factorial ANOVA was conducted to compare the main effects of the within-factors type of cue and type of scenario, and the interaction effect between the within-factors and the between-factor (condition) upon recall. The main effect for type of cue yielded an F ratio of F(1,105) = 87.190, p = < 0.001, η2 = 0.45, indicating that participants recalled scenarios better when presented with goal cues (mean = 1.35, SD = 0.05) than when presented with repetition cues (mean = 0.75, SD = 0.05). A large effect size was evident. These results confirm the first hypothesis and support the notion that goals are inferred from the goal-directed behavior of others.
15 Interaction effect. However, no significant interaction effect was found between conditions, type of cue and type of scenario upon recall, F(1,94) = 1.582, p = 0.198. These results imply that between conditions, the effect of the type of cue on recall did not differ between the different types of scenarios. The second hypothesis, which states that a focal goal weakens the effect of the type of cue upon recall among alternative scenarios, was not supported. All results are displayed in Table 1. No significant interaction effects were obtained from the analysis.
Discussion
People infer goals from other people by observing their behavior (Hassin et al., 2005). Although multiple moderators on goal inferences have identified, much remains unknown regarding the influence of different circumstances on goal inferences. It was this lack of knowledge which led to the present investigation of the effect of having a goal on goal inferences. We have also attempted to incorporate the line of research on goal shielding into our study on goal inferences. We hypothesized that while goals would be inferred, the inference of alternative goals would be weakened when a focal goal was salient.
However, the results do not support the assumption that having a goal affects the inferences of other people’s goals. Participants inferred goals from scenarios that described behavior, regardless of whether they had a focal goal themselves or not. These findings do not support the notion that goal shielding affects goal inferences by inhibiting goal-related information of alternative goals.
The results do, however, replicate the findings of Hassin et al. (2005), who claimed that people automatically make goal inferences. The inference of alternative goals, even when a focal goal is salient, provides suggestive support for the notion that goal inferences are indeed made automatically. One of the criteria of automatism is that a process requires a minimal amount of cognitive resources (Bargh, 1994). Thus, if people can infer goals even
16 when the required mental information is inhibited, they are actually very efficient in their use of cognitive resources. Other factors from the definition of automatism, such as
controllability or awareness, cannot be addressed based on the results of the present study. While this implication strongly supports the conclusion drawn by Hassin et al. (2005), there are other possibilities as well that should be taken into account. Therefore, in the
following sections we discuss the methodological limitations of the study that may contributed to the lack of results according to our second hypothesis. We also provide conceptual ideas to implement in future research.
Manipulation of the Focal Goal
A possible and very plausible explanation of the absence of the expected effect in our study is that the manipulation of activating a focal goal was not executed successfully. We found that participants who were supposed to have a focal study goal were actually not more committed to academic achievement than their counterparts from the control condition, in which no goal was activated. Therefore, the effect of having a focal goal could also not have been present. Perhaps the focal goal was absent because having a goal requires having a desired end state (Kruglanski et al. 2002), which was not given to participants from the focal goal condition. Instructing participants a priori that they needed to fulfill a goal-related task at the end of the experimental session may have been a better strategy by which to activate the focal goal (Aarts et al., 2007; Shah et al., 2002).
Although no interaction effects were found, it can be argued that the manipulation check was not an appropriate measure by which to assess whether the manipulation was executed successfully. The manipulation check measured whether there was a difference in commitment to academic achievement between conditions. However, goal shielding does not occur when someone is committed to a particular goal, but when that focal goal becomes salient (Kruglanski et al., 2002). Consequently, testing a participant to determine whether
17 s/he is committed to a goal is not a valid method by which to predict goal shielding and is therefore not sufficient to assess whether the manipulation was successfully executed. In future studies, a top-of-mind elicitation task should be conducted to measure whether a focal goal is mentally salient or not (Ratneshwar et al., 2001).
Encoding vs. Retrieval processes
Another possibility that would explain the absence of the expected effect is that the focal goal was mentally salient among participants from the focal goal condition; however, this cannot be verified with absolute certainty. Should this be the case, there should be an explanation of why no differences in effect were found between conditions on the dependent variable. In terms of the latter, it may be that the tool used to assess goal inferences, namely the surprise cued-recall task based on Hassin et al. (2005), is not suited to detect differences in goal inferences between participants who have a salient focal goal and those who
have not. Encoding versus retrieval processes can explain this possibility.
People make inferences by reading textual information after the information is encoded at the moment of reading and stored in (short-term) memory (McKoon & Ratcliff, 1992). Since having a salient focal goal inhibits mental information on conflicting goals (Shah et al., 2002), it should be harder to encode information that is inconsistent with salient knowledge than it is to encode information that is consistent with such knowledge (McKoon & Ratcliff, 1992). However, the question remains of whether these differences in encoding would still be measurable at the moment of retrieval?
The surprise cued-recall task uses cues to help participants recall scenarios they have read earlier. According to McKoon and Ratcliff (1992), the goal cue used in the task is already sufficient to retrieve information that people have automatically processed while reading it previously. Consequently, the capacity of participants to recall scenarios that they encoded efficiently would be as good as that for scenarios that were harder to encode.
18 Because the cue provided is sufficient to retrieve both kinds of situations, the task cannot detect the difference in encoding between the two. In this case, the differences in encoding as a result of goal shielding are too small to manifest in differences in recall during the surprise cued-recall task. If this statement is valid, the surprise cued-recall task is not an appropriate tool to measure differences in encoding and, therefore, to infer goals from behavior.
To test whether activating a focal goal influences the extent of encoding and therefore the inferring of goals from other people’s behaviors, the inference at the moment of encoding should be measured. The probe recognition task (McKoon & Ratcliff, 1992; Hassin et al., 2002) is, for example, known to be an appropriate tool to measure small differences in encoding.
In the present study we were not able to prove the hypothesis that people selectively infer others’ intentions in a goal-dependent process, although existing literature does suggest that we do so in the process to achieve our aims. Here, we have discussed the possible methodological limitations that may underlie our inability to prove our hypothesis, and we have proposed alternative strategies for future research that may allow stronger conclusions to be drawn. To summarize, the results of our study show that people do spontaneously observe the actions of others in terms of the goals they pursue; as such, they replicate the findings of Hassin et al. (2005).
Given that we know just what kind of effects the goals of others can have on our own goals, a good awareness of these goals and their effects is recommended. Steve Jobs would have said that deciding which goals not to infer, is as important as deciding which goals to infer.
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22 Table 1
Mean recall as a function of scenario type, cue type and condition
Goal cue Repetition cue
n Mean (SD) n Mean (SD)
Study goal scenarios
Focal goal condition 51 1.459 (0.704) 51 0.686 (0.694) Control condition 56 1.174 (0.660) 56 0.536 (0.706) Alternative goal scenarios
Focal goal condition 51 1.441 (0.591) 51 0.873 (0.603) Control condition 56 1.339 (0.666) 56 0.906 (0.559)
23 Appendix
Focal goal scenarios
1. Rick has not done so much the last couple weeks, so he has to work all night to finish his assignment on time
Goal cue: Getting deadline Repetition cue: Not so much
2. After breakfast, Lieke grabs her bicycle and goes to the university* Goal cue: Attending lecture
Repetition cue: Bicycle
3. Simon starts the recorded lecture and makes sure he has a notebook with unwritten pages prepared
Goal cue: Making notes Repetition cue: Pages
4. Tim creates a WhatsApp group for his working group, so that the communication will run smoothly
Goal cue: Working together Repetition cue: Smoothly
5. Eva nervously puts her pencil and bottle of water ready and fills in her student number on the form
Goal cue: Making an exam Repetition cue: Water
6. Leon asks the people behind him to be quiet when the teacher starts his explanation Goal cue: Pay attention
Repetition cue: Quiet
7. A busy period of studying is heading for Bob, so he grabs his agenda Goal cue: Making a planning
24 8. In 10 minutes, Marjory has an appointment with her study counselor, so she’s heading to his room with a rush
Goal cue: Coming on time Repetition cue: Appointment
9. Harm looks at multiple scientific articles in order to build ideas regarding the structure of his own introduction*
Goal cue: Writing thesis Repetition cue: Structure
10. Sarah received a poor grade, and during the recap of the exam she compliments the teacher about his nice suit
Goal cue: Raise grade Repetition cue: Suit
Alternative goal-scenarios
1. Hans goes to the joke shop to buy a costume, as he leaves for Endhoven in two days already
Goal cue: Celebrating “carnaval” Repetition cue: Buy
2. Raymond removes the jokers and hands out the cards to the rest, while he discusses the rules with them*
Goal cue: Playing game Repetition cue: Rules
3. Romy and Laura are going to a cozy café where they can hear each other clearly Goal cue: Chatting
Repetition cue: Hear
4. Floris is standing before Nienke her door with a bouquet of roses and two tickets for the cinema
Goal cue: Going on a date Repetition cue: Door
25 5. Joyce has put some money aside purposely, and steps into the tram to the central district with her girlfriend
Goal cue: Shopping Repetition cue: Tram
6. Joris takes three weeks off and is already searching for the cheapest ticket to Ibiza Goal cue: Going on holiday
Repetition cue: Cheapest
7. The weather is very nice today, so Kim and Maaike put on their sturdy shoes Goal cue: Taking a walk
Repetition cue: Sturdy
8. Giel eats away his hangover with a big omelet, while he is already wondering where to go tonight
Goal cue: Going out Repetition cue: Omelet
9. Patrick walks to the swimming pool with his beach towel with him and asks Paulien if she could put some sunscreen on him*
Goal cue: Sunbathing
Repetition cue: Swimming pool
10. Angelique purposely did not wear stilettos, and walks with her girlfriends to the disco where her favorite DJ is playing
Goal cue: Dancing Repetition cue: Favorite
