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Perceiving Value in Obligations and Goals: Wanting to Do What Should Be Done

University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Ronnie Janoff-Bulman

University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Justin Cotter

University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Four studies investigated the perception of autonomous motives for obligations—of "wants" in activities regarded as "shoulds." In Study 1, respondents provided their reasons for engaging in self-generated obligations, whereas in Study 2, the experimenter provided the obligations. In both studies, participants spontaneously gave few autonomous motives, but their frequency was associated with respondents’ life satisfaction, and virtually all were able to generate autonomous motives when these were elicited. Study 3 found a strong positive correlation between perceptions of wants and shoulds in participants’ goals. A mediational model found that both wants and shoulds had direct, but opposite, effects on life satisfaction but only wants predicted goal success, the strongest path to life satisfaction. In Study 4, an appreciation-focus (vs. a resentment-focus or no specific emotion-focus) led to the perception of shoulds as wants in goal conflict situations; open-ended responses provided some clues to this transformation process.

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