Planfulness: A Process-Focused Construct of Individual Differences in Goal Achievement

Collabra: Psychology

Elliot T. Berkman¹  Sanjay Srivastava¹  Rita M. Ludwig¹ 

[1] University of Oregon, Eugene, Oregon

关键词: Goals;    Self-regulation;    Individual differences;    Planning;    Human performance;   

DOI  :  10.1525/collabra.136

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: University of California Press

【 摘 要 】

Goal pursuit outcomes are partly caused by the way people think about goals. Specific patterns of thought can increase the likelihood of goal achievement, such as generating heuristics to automate goal-related decision making, orienting present-moment attention to the future to increase the salience of a distal goal, and contrasting the anticipated enjoyment of an achieved goal with the progress required to complete it. However, it is unknown whether there are stable individual differences in the tendency to deploy particular meta-cognitions during goal pursuit. A tool to assess such differences would help to identify and intervene on personal barriers to goal progress. Here, we define a new construct within the conscientiousness domain—planfulness—that captures a person’s proclivity to adopt efficient goal-related cognition in pursuit of their goals. We hypothesize that planfulness consists of three interrelated facets representing distinct mental processes, temporal orientation (TO), cognitive strategies (CS), and mental flexibility (MF), and that planfulness predicts goal achievement on an individual basis. We developed a 30-item Planfulness Scale with three subscales tested and refined across 5 studies and 10 samples (total unique N = 4,318) using iterative exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis on data collected from both student and on-line samples. The Planfulness Scale demonstrated both convergent and discriminant validity when compared to other measurements, and scale scores predicted goal progress in a longitudinal study. We find that planfulness is a useful new construct for self-regulation research, and the 30-item Planfulness Scale to be a valid and reliable measurement of real-world goal achievement.

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【 授权许可】

CC BY