When your goals inspire my goals: the role of effort, personal value, and inference in goal contagion

Just observing other people can influence what we do. Under certain conditions, it inspires us to strive for the same goal as the other person. Such goal contagion occurs, because one first automatically infers the goal and then adopts it for oneself. In a series of three experiments (overall N = 840 university students), we investigated personal goal value and the observed person’s effort as moderators of goal contagion, which is mediated by goal inference. In all three experiments, participants read a brief story about a student who either wants to earn money (target goal) or to do an internship (control) and expects to show much or little effort. In Studies 1a and b, goal inference was the dependent variable, whereas in Study 2, we considered the full moderated-mediation model and measured how strongly participants pursue the goal to earn money. We aimed at locating the moderators within this two-step process. We hypothesized that high effort increases goal inference, whereas personal goal value strengthens the relationship between goal inference and goal adoption. Across experiments, we did find evidence for explicit and spontaneous, but not for implicit goal inference. Furthermore, participants did not pursue to earn money to a different degree across conditions and different degrees of goal value. Taken together, neither the moderated-mediation process nor the basic goal contagion effect was supported. Results are discussed in the light of other published studies on goal contagion and the current Replication Crisis.