Executive Summary
This response to Avnet and Higgins’s (2006) article considers the notion of regulatory fit from a goal-systemic perspective. Avnet and Higgins suggest that regulatory fit corresponds to a match between a person’s activity and his or her process (background) goal of pursuing an attainment (focal) goal in a desired manner. Prior regulatory fit data are considered from the present perspective, and additional issues are raised for further research and theoretical elucidation.
In goal systems theory, a means or a way of doing things is preferred and experienced as more pleasant when it serves multiple objectives (in goal-systemic terms, when it is “multifinal”). This is the case in regulatory fit studies in which fulfillment of an attainment goal (e.g., obtaining a desired object) is coupled with fulfillment of a process goal (e.g., doing so in a manner that corresponds with a person’s regulatory focus—in a vigilant manner for people with a prevention orientation and in a zealous manner for people with a promotion orientation).
Several implications follow from considering “regulatory orientation” a process goal. Fit, which consists of that goal being matched, should give a person a positive sense of satisfaction. Indeed, the key notion of the regulatory fit formulation is that fit fosters the experience of feeling right, which sounds very much like a satisfying state of affairs. If this is so, regulatory fit and attainment of the activity’s objective (i.e., the attainment goal) should be additive in their effects on satisfaction. A match with both (e.g., attaining the desired object and doing so in the desired manner) should engender greater feelings of satisfaction than a match with neither, and a match with one but not the other occupies an intermediate position.
It also seems plausible that the feeling-right experience would give a person a sense of self-assurance and self-worth. The sense that things are “going smoothly” and that all of a person’s goals and preferences are being matched might increase his or her sense of self-assurance, contributing to self-ascribed epistemic authority in various domains. In turn, this might enhance a person’s confidence in the validity of his or her reactions to various stimuli, regardless of whether these reactions are positive or negative.
In summary, the goal-systemic perspective poses a challenge to regulatory fit theory that could lead to exciting new research designed to ascertain whether the fit phenomena that Avnet and Higgins describe are as unique as they claim or whether these phenomena represent a sense of progress to a person’s important objectives of whatever kind, responsible for the feeling-right experience and its consequences.
Biography
Arie W. Kruglanski is Distinguished University Professor of Psychology at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is a recipient of the National Institute of Mental Health Research Scientist Award, the Senior Humboldt Award, and the Donald Campbell Award for Outstanding Contributions to Social Psychology. He was Fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences and is Fellow of the American Psychological Association and the American Psychological Society. He has served as editor of Journal of Personality and Social Psychology: Attitudes and Social Cognition, editor of Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, and associate editor of American Psychologist. His interests have been in the domains of human judgment and decision making, the motivation–cognition interface, group and intergroup processes, and the psychology of human goals. His work has been disseminated in more than 180 articles, chapters, and books and has been continuously supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Mental Health, Deutsche Forschungs Gemeineschaft, the Ford Foundation, and the Israeli Academy of Science. He has recently served as member of the National Academy of Science panel on counterterrorism and is now a codirector of the National Center for the Study of Terrorism and the Response to Terrorism at the University of Maryland.
J Marketing Research, Volume 43, Number 1, February 2006
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