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Category: Project

Description: Do we have the necessary perceptual abilities to set goals that are congruent with our own values and needs? In a prospective study, participants (n=185) identified three goals that they planned to pursue throughout the week. For each goal they then rated their motivation for pursuing it and made predictions about the extent to which goal attainment would satisfy their needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness. One week later, participants rated their progress on each goal, as well as the actual need satisfaction they experienced. Using Bayesian analysis, we found support for our (null) hypothesis that participants predicted that their goals would satisfy their basic needs, irrespective of goal self-concordance. While people sometimes overestimated their need forecasts, we found that people who pursued more self-concordant goals actually benefited more from their pursuits, both compared to others who pursued less concordant goals and among their own goals.