Distractions: Friend or Foe in the Pursuit of Conscious and Nonconscious Goals?

We have all had the experience of going to a coffee shop with the intent of working, but becoming distracted: the loud conversation at the next table, the music, the sunny weather outside, or even the desire to buy and eat a red velvet cupcake. How might these different types of distractions affect your goal to work? Will the consequences differ depending on whether your goal is conscious or nonconscious? Conscious and nonconscious goals are generally believed to lead to similar processes and outcomes (e.g. Bargh et al. 2001; Chartrand and Bargh 1996). More recently, however, research is examining how the two types of goals may differ (Gollwitzer, ParksStamm, and Oettingen 2009). Our research posits that the pursuit of conscious and nonconscious goals diverges when faced with distractions. Consistent with the view that there is a limited pool of cognitive resources (Kruglanski et al. 2002), when a focal goal is faced with a distraction, the motivated response can be to protect the goal and protect the cognitive resources. We propose that because the activation and pursuit of conscious goals require cognitive resources (Kruglanski et al. 2002), introducing a distraction that threatens to compete for those resources will increase the importance of the goal and as a result, increase goal adherence. The activation and pursuit of nonconscious goals, however, require very few cognitive resources (Bargh and Barndollar 1996), such that distractions are not perceived as a threat that requires a response. We hypothesize, therefore, that distractions will enhance the accessibility and pursuit of a conscious goal, but have no effect on a nonconscious goal. Furthermore, we examine the effect that different types of distractions will have on the pursuit of conscious and nonconscious goals. As a key component of our theorizing involves the consumption of cognitive resources by a goal, and the subsequent threat posed to those resources by a distraction, we expect that the increase in goal pursuit will be further moderated by the extent to which the distractions consume cognitive resources. More specifically, we hypothesize that the nature of the distraction will moderate the effect of distractions on goal pursuit. We test these hypotheses in a series of three experiments.