The Pursuit of a Goal
S02049173
Front Range Community College
Introduction
In the study article written by John Milton Adams and Will Hart “Can the Means Justify the Ends? A Pleasant Journey Toward a Goal Increases the Value of the Goal”, the researchers discuss whether having a pleasant progression towards a goal increases satisfaction when the goal is achieved (Adams and Hart, 2015). The study looked at different scenarios that involved participants doing something towards a goal with either pleasant or unpleasant processes. The idea of the study is that, when you enjoy the work towards the goal, the goal itself becomes more valuable (Adams and Hart, 2015). It is fairly well known that people experience satisfaction when
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Unlike the first study, this study was more randomized. They offered any students in the library a candy bar for participation. They got one hundred and eighty volunteers. They used the data from one-hundred and sixty one participants (less than half were male). The volunteers were given a multiple choice—one question quiz to answer after reading a paragraph. The paragraph described a scenario where they had to determine the purpose of the activity (i.e. if it was related to their task/paragraph). They then moved on to another paragraph that changed the goal. The volunteers were then presented with an activity based on their position in the study. Those volunteers who were “In the pleasant-means condition, participants played a computer game (“Tetris”). In the unpleasant-means condition, participants were asked to circle and count all of the “lower-case e’s” in an esoteric biology article.” (Adams and Hart, 2015) After completing either a fun activity (Tetris) or a non-fun activity, the volunteers were asked if they would be willing to do another task. What they found was that when the initial task (the paragraph) was a related-goal condition, the volunteers were more willing to go another round if their task was