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Managing multiple and conflicting goals is a demand typical to both everyday life and complex coordination tasks. Two experiments (N = 111) investigated how goal conflicts affect motivation and cognition in a complex problemsolving paradigm. In Experiment 1, participants dealt with a game-like computer simulation involving a predefined goal relation: Parallel goals were independent, mutually facilitating, or interfering with one another. As expected, goal conflicts entailed lowered motivation and wellbeing. Participants’ understanding of causal effects within the simulation was impaired, too. Behavioral measures of subjects’ interventions support the idea of adaptive, self-regulatory processes: reduced action with growing awareness of the goal conflict and balanced goal pursuit. Experiment 2 endorses the hypotheses of motivation loss and reduced acquisition of system-related knowledge in an extended problem-solving paradigm of four conflicting goals. Impairing effects of goal interference on motivation and wellbeing were found, although less distinct and robust as in Experiment 1. Participants undertook fewer interventions in case of a goal conflict and acquired less knowledge about the system. Formal complexity due to the interconnectedness among goals is discussed as a limiting influence on inferring the problem structure. INTRODUCTION You cannot have your cake and eat it, too. One of the possibly best-known goal conflicts is delivered by a proverb. Similar common sayings across other languages exist, marking conflicting strivings an intercultural or even universal phenomenon. Examples from everyday life are abundant: working overtime in order to qualify for a better job vs. spending leisure time with friends or family, affording either an expensive holiday trip or a redecorated apartment, enrolling to a fitness class vs. watching TV in the evening, just to name a few. From an interpersonal point of view, goal conflicts can be found within the structure of enterprises and organizations. Managers in business and industry, e.g., ought to keep a balance between financial gains, customers' demands, efficient work processes and both sustaining and developing employees' human resources [1]. Multiple goals may arise from the demands of multiple lobbies. They can entail both interpersonal goal conflicts between the lobbies’ members as well as intrapersonal goal conflicts within an ambivalent manager’s mind. Yet, to pursue multiple and conflicting goals is more than a mere decision on priority, subordinate and dispensable goals. The manager in our example additionally needs to figure out how each of the goals can be achieved. Experience through exploration, analytical and practical skills are necessary to overcome barriers that make the desired state differ from the situation at hand – a prototypical instance of complex problem solving [2]. In the present , we investigate how cognitive representations and strategies in problem solving are affected by goal conflicts. Emphasis is put on the interaction between cognition, motivation, and the experience of distress. A complex dynamic control (CDC) task approach is ed and applied in two subsequent experiments. GERAL DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS The aim of the ed study was to examine motivational and cognitive effects of conflicting goals or strivings. Goal conflicts are well known, universalized phenomena experienced in both group interactions and intra-individual struggling. Our work focused on the intra-individual perspective with particular regard to new, non-routine situations in which an existing incongruity between goals must be detected and managed. Although empirical research has reliably shown motivational impairment of long-term conflict experience (e.g., [9]) the specific approach to problem solving is a new one. Thus far, in the domain of complexproblem solving systematic investigations on polytely have been scarce. As a tool of experimental manipulation and control of goal conflicts we applied a complex dynamic control task, an engaging, game-like computer simulation in which approaching one goal could be performed but at the expense of falling short of another goal. The results of two studies (N = 111) support the notion that even in a standardized laboratory setting goal conflicts can be induced. These conflicts lessen motivation during the process of complex problem solving. Reduced confidence in success, impaired wellbeing and increased hesitation are measurable consequences. The findings fit well with the first three out of the five hypotheses we propose in our above framework. Yet from our experiments there is no evidence that conflict-induced motivational losses strongly affect cognitive problem-solving performance in a linear predictable manner. On a descriptive level we can infer that people becoming gradually aware of a goal conflict react to this awareness in some way. They reveal changed patterns of exploration strategies. Namely, as a generalized trend they will increase action initially. With growing experience manipulations will decrease. Paralleling this effect, problem-solvers will be inclined to try a balanced pursuit of the incompatible goals. In the present studies manipulation patterns were only observed on the base of aggregated data, i.e., effects averaged over experimental treatment conditions and time steps. Extended individual process analyses including think aloud protocols and time-series designs might yield more precise patterns. These in turn would help to refine the strategy hypothesis in our framework as well as the hypothesis of knowledge acquisition. Our experimental work did not confirm the idea that demotivated problem solvers who are struggling with induced goal conflicts can analyze and reproduce formal relationships within the structure of a complex scenario any better or worse than do relaxed, motivated participants of a control condition as long as the degree of formal complexity is identical. To reinvestigate this fifth hypothesis of the framework it might be necessary to extend subjects’ exploration opportunities. In order to systematically test for effects of single manipulations the number of exploration trials should be increased possibly in combination with less intervention measures to be selected.()，英语论文，英语论文范文 |
