Lots of the things we hope to do in life—our goals—can be
accomplished in many ways. If you want
to go into business for yourself, you might first train at a company that does
similar work and then find a business partner, and then start your own
firm. Alternatively, you might go to
school to get some additional skills.
While you are in school, you might also try to make contacts with
potential business partners. After
completing school and finding a partner, you can then start your business. The plans you create to achieve your goals
are an important determinant in whether you succeed.
So, it is useful to know something about how you generate
plans.
An interesting paper in the October, 2010 issue of Psychological Science by Kachina Allen,
Steven Ibara, Amy Seymour, Natalia Cordova, and Matthew Botvinick looks at one
influence on our plans. They suggest
that people may have very abstract plan structures that can be used to suggest
how people may achieve many different kinds of goals. Activating one of those abstract structures
may make it easier to use that same structure again in the future.
One structure that people may use is a goal chain. First you perform action A, then action B, and
then action C, which allows you to achieve your goal. The first plan I suggested above has this
structure. First you train, then you
look for a business partner, finally you start your own business.
Another structure involves carrying out independent actions
at the same time in order to ultimately achieve your goal. That is, you perform action A and action B at
the same time, and then use those actions to do action C, which allows you to
achieve your goal. The example where you
go to school and look for business partners at the same time and then start a
company is an example of this structure.
The authors of this paper did two studies to demonstrate
that people have these abstract structures for thinking about plans. In the first, they had people read sentences
that described sequences of actions. The
sequences of actions could have either of the two structures I just
discussed. For example, the sentence
“John purchased a carousel ticket, gave it to the attendant, and went for a
ride” has a goal chain structure. The
sentence “John sliced up some tomatoes, rinsed off some lettuce, and tossed
together a salad” has the structure of doing two independent events and then
putting those together to do a third.
Some people saw 40 sentences (half of each type) randomly
intermixed. A second group saw the
sentences blocked, so that they saw 20 sentences of one type followed by 20
sentences of the other type. The group
that read the sentences in a blocked order read and comprehended the sentences
faster than the group that read them intermixed. This result suggests that people were able to
reuse the same goal structure over and over when a whole batch of sentences all
used the same abstract plan structure.
Another explanation for the results of this first study is
that there is something about the way we structure and comprehend language that
is affecting reading speed. That is, the
sentences used to describe plans may have a similar structure in a way that
benefits reading about similar plans.
To test this possibility, the authors did a clever
study. They had people read the same
kinds of sentences randomly intermixed.
Before each sentence, people saw an arrangement of three blocks. The blocks could be arranged in a tower or an
arch. The tower is similar to a goal
chain, because creating a tower requires stacking one block on a second and
then putting a third on top. The arch is
similar to the independent events, because two blocks are placed on the ground
and a third is placed on top of it.
If people saw a tower first, they were faster to read
sentences describing a goal chain than a plan with independent events. If people saw an arch, the plan with
independent events was read faster than the goal chain. So, the results of the first experiment were
not just a reflection of the way people understand language.
This set of findings suggests that we are able to represent
our plans at an abstract level that focuses just on the structure of the events
in the plan. Activating the general
structure of a plan makes it easier to think about other plans with the same
structure in the future. One factor that
affects how we try to achieve our goals is the general structure of the plans
we have used in the past. When
evaluating a new plan, then, it is worthwhile thinking about whether there are
other ways to achieve the same goal to make sure that we have not missed
another plan structure that might be better-suited to the goal we are trying to
achieve.
