Multifinality Without Awareness: Implicit Value Maximizing in Dynamic Goal Environments

关于动机的心理学理论通常认为，人们的行为是为了从他们的选择中获得最好的结果，或者是最高的(主观决定的)价值。也就是说，人们的行为方式会带来他们想要的结果。它还假设，每个人都有意识地意识到他们正在追求的目标，如果人们同时有几个目标，这些目标就会相互冲突，导致人们代表其他目标放弃一些目标。马里兰大学的Arie Kruglanski博士和他的同事们提出了一项研究，挑战了这些假设，并探索了一种单一的手段或行为可能同时服务于多个目标，甚至是外部意识的“多终极”概念。研究人员提出：(1)当个体忙于追求各种外显目标时，新的目标往往被环境的特征和个体的动态联想流所激活；(2)这种新激活的目标可能会影响个体在行为者意识之外的行为；(3)在这种情况下，个体可能寻求在不牺牲显性追求目标的情况下实现内隐目标的活动。找到这样的多最终活动可以被认为是“理性的”，因为它通过同时达到多个理想的目的来最大化主观价值。这项拟议的工作审查了寻找多决赛活动的条件，以及进行多决赛活动所涉及的潜在心理权衡。它还考察了个人对多最终活动的搜索如何受到显性目标和隐性目标之间价值差异的影响，以及人们对不同活动在多大程度上更好地服务于显性目标和隐性目标的敏感度。总体而言，这项工作有望有助于对推动人类行动的无意识动机的作用的总体理解；它也为选择和自我控制的心理学提供了重要的见解，包括成瘾、暴力行为和肥胖等主题。

Psychological theories about motivation often assume that people act so as to obtain the best outcomes from their choices, or the highest (subjectively determined) value. That is, people behave in ways that they believe will bring about the desired results. It is also assumed that individuals are consciously aware of the goals they are pursuing, and, to the extent that people had several goals at once, these goals would conflict with each other, leading people to relinquish some of the goals on behalf of the others. Dr. Arie Kruglanski of the University of Maryland and colleagues propose research that challenges these assumptions and explore the concept of "multifinality" in which a single means or behavior may simultaneously serve multiple goals, even outside awareness. The researchers propose that: (1) while individuals are busy pursuing various explicit objectives, new goals are often activated by features of the environment and by the individuals' dynamic stream of associations, (2) such newly activated goals may affect individuals' behavior outside the actors' conscious awareness, (3) in these conditions, individuals may seek activities that afford the attainment of implicit goals without sacrificing the explicitly pursued objectives. Finding such multifinal activities can be considered "rational" as it maximizes subjective value by simultaneously attaining multiple desirable ends. The proposed work examines the conditions under which the search for multifinal activities will take place, and the potential psychological tradeoffs involved in pursuing multifinal activities. It also examines how individuals' search for multifinal activities is influenced by the difference in value between the explicit and implicit goals, and how sensitive people are to the degree to which different activities serve better the explicit versus the implicit goals. Overall, this work promises to contribute to the general understanding of the role of unconscious motivation that drives human action; it also offers important insights into the psychology of choice and self-control, including topics like addiction, violent behavior, and obesity.