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Motivating the Journey: An Integrative Framework of Prevention Versus Promotion Goal Pursuit Activities

Does a focus on gains versus non-losses influence the kinds of activities people are motivated to use when pursuing their goals? This paper proposes that the prevention and promotion systems posited within regulatory focus theory motivate fundamentally different activities in the process of goal pursuit. We present a novel, integrative framework of regulatory focus-specific goal pursuit process activities and provide initial evidence testing this framework. First, across two studies involving activity sorting tasks, we predicted that participants would consistently categorize activities from the proposed framework as reflecting the hypothesized regulatory focus, and in making these categorization decisions, would sort regulatory focus-specific process activities from the proposed framework more quickly than more general goal pursuit process activities. Furthermore, in two follow-up studies probing activity accessibility, we hypothesized that motivationally relevant process activities (i.e., those reflecting individual differences in participants’ own regulatory focus) would be more accessible as measured by output primacy than process activities that were not motivationally relevant. Across these four studies, using both correlational and experimental methods, we found converging evidence in support of these predictions and our proposed framework. We suggest that this framework provides new insight into the motivational antecedents of distinct goal pursuit activities. Furthermore, it may be useful in generating new hypotheses about how best to motivate effective goal pursuit processes.