A quick walk through the checkout
line at most grocery stores takes you past an array of magazines that the store
hopes you will grab on your way out. The
headlines from those magazines scream out solutions to the problems people
struggle with. And to judge from their
content, three of the biggest problems center around weight loss, sex, and
relationships.
Why are relationships such a
source of anxiety?
A paper by Laura VanderDrift and
Christopher Agnew in the June, 2014 issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology suggests that personal goals that
people have trade off against relationship goals in ways that can hurt relationships.
The broad idea is one that is
related to research that I
did several years ago with Miguel Brendl and Claude Messner. We found that when people were strongly
motivated to pursue a goal, it made people appreciate (or value) goal related
objects more and to devalue goal unrelated objects.
Similarly, these researchers
suggest that when people are highly motivated to pursue a personal goal, they
devalue their relationship.
In their studies, people were
either asked to consider a personal goal relevant to them (Should I learn to
play the saxophone or not?) or to actually think about the steps required to
carry out that goal (What are five steps I would need to take to learn to play
the saxophone?). Previous research by
Peter Gollwitzer and his colleagues suggests that thinking about the steps
required to carry out a goal increases the strength of that goal more than just
thinking about the goal in general.
Across five studies in this paper,
participants were much less willing to engage in behaviors that would have a
positive impact on their relationship if they had an active personal goal than
if they did not.
In one study, participants who
were in a relationship were less willing to forgive their partner for a
transgression when they had an active personal goal than when they did
not. This was particularly true for
transgressions that would get in the way of their personal goal.
In another study, participants
were given the opportunity to get information improving their relationship or
improving their ability to achieve personal goals. People who had an active personal goal were
much less interested in getting information about how to improve their relationship
than those who did not have an active personal goal. However, the more strongly that people felt
that their romantic partner helps them to achieve personal goals, the more
interested they were in information that would help them improve their
relationship. So, even their interest in
relationship information was related to whether that would help them achieve
their personal goal.
A final study reversed this effect. In this study, some participants were induced
to have a strong relationship goal by having them list steps they would take to
improve their relationship. This group
was much less interested in getting information to improve personal goals than
a group that did not have an active relationship goal.
This set of findings reflects an
important aspect of our motivational system.
We are very efficient at achieving the goals that the motivational
system engages. As a result, we focus on
information that is useful for achieving our goals and we devalue information
that is not related to achieving that goal. So, when we have an important
personal goal, our relationships take a back seat. When we have an important relationship goals,
our personal goals take a back seat.
So, if you find yourself wandering
through the supermarket checkout aisle, and you resonate to the headlines about
relationship problems, it might be time to think about specific steps you could
take to improve your relationship as a way of engaging that goal.
