The Subjective Experience of Goal Failure: How Choosing the Lesser Evil Eradicates the Negative Consequences of Goal Failure

Imagine that you’re attending a morning meeting and are offered an assortment of pastries: muffins, donuts, and brownies. While deciding whether to indulge in one of these tempting options you remember your fitness goal, and therefore opt for the muffin since you perceive it as the healthiest of the three options – i.e. lesser evil. How will this choice affect your subsequent food-related decisions throughout the day? Will your initial indulgence encourage or discourage subsequent healthy eating? The goal literature suggests that once we violate an activated goal, the resulting feelings of guilt and despair generally impel further transgressions (McGonigal 2011; Soman and Cheema 2004). Based on these findings, we would predict that the individual depicted in the introductory scenario who violated her fitness goal by eating a muffin is likely to temporary disengage from the focal fitness goal, and continue to indulge throughout the day. In the present paper, I suggest that violating a goal does not always demotivate behavior. Focusing on the decision context that offers exclusively vice alternatives (i.e. options that violate a goal), I suggest that the subjective experience of goal failure is dampened when choosing the lesser evil option – i.e. option that is least detrimental to the foal goal, by attenuating perceptions of goal digression. In this sense, even though a goal violation transpired, selecting the lesser evil can actually motivate subsequent goal-congruent choices, similarly as if no transgression was committed.