Consumers Anticipating and Managing Goal Failure: How Past Conflicts Shape Expectations and Language Influences Recovery

Consumers frequently encounter obstacles and failures in their pursuit of valued goals. For example, while pursuing the important goal of living a healthy lifestyle, central to their current and future well-being, consumers might encounter multiple obstacles, conflicts, and setbacks. These challenges are costly for industries whose product offerings support these goals and are detrimental to consumers’ well-being. This dissertation addresses two critical questions. First, given that obstacles, conflicts, and failure are so prevalent, what influences whether consumers expect them to occur? Second, once setbacks or failures have occurred, how do consumers respond?The first essay in this dissertation addresses the first question, investigating how past experiences of conflict with a goal inform expectations about future goal pursuit. Specifically, I examine how the perceived relationship among past conflicts with a focal goal—particularly, perceived variety—shapes expectations. Perceived variety refers to the holistic assessment of differentiation (vs. similarity) among items in an assortment. Six studies demonstrate that perceiving greater variety among past conflicts with a focal goal decreases expectations of encountering conflict in the future. This occurs because perceiving greater variety makes the causes of past events seem collectively unstable (i.e., more temporary and one-off). The second essay addresses the second question, investigating how the way consumers talk about setbacks and failure—specifically, as “not making” versus “not having” time— can shape their subsequent motivation and likelihood to re-engage with their goals. First, a multimethod examination, including the analysis of social media and mass media datasets, illustrates that consumers prefer to say they didn’t “have” (vs. “make”) time for a goal because doing so makes them feel better about what occurred. Second, the results of five experiments, including two field experiments, show how prompting consumers to say they didn’t “make” time instead, increases subsequent motivation to adhere to a goal. This occurs because doing so increases perceptions of personal control. Overall, this dissertation's findings contribute to our understanding of goal conflict, forecasting in goal pursuit, and how language influences recovery after goal failure.