A Broadened Model of Goal-Directed Behavior: Incorporating the Conative Force into Consumer Research

Beginning of article

1. INTRODUCTION

Across disciplines, researchers have been engaged to predict a variety of volitional behaviors on the basis of the attitude-behavior relationship models stemmed from attitude theory, such as theory of reasoned action (TRA) (e.g., Shimp and Kavas 1984; Bagozzi et al. 2000; Fitzmaurice 2005), theory of planned behavior (TPB) (e.g., Beale and Manstead 1991; Kalafatis and Pollard 1999; Lim and Dubinsky 2005), and model of goal-directed behavior (MGB) (e.g., Perugini and Conner 2000; Bagozzi and Dholakia 2002; Leone, Perugini, and Ercolani 2004). Volition can be understood as "the freedom to make choices about what to do" (Huitt 1999), and accordingly, a volitional behavior is "an action that a person is able and intends to perform, and whose execution no factors prevent" (Bagozzi 1992, p.180). Bagozzi (1992) highlights the conative self-regulatory process in forming the behavioral volition and the driving force of the goal in achieving behavioral volition and behavioral outcomes. From an individual psychology perspective, conation, which constitutes volition sensu lato, is "the personal, intentional, planful, deliberate, goal-oriented, or striving component of motivation, the proactive (as opposed to reactive or habitual) aspect of behavior" (Huitt 1999).

The conative components of the mind, such as setting goals, making plans, or controlling emotions, is developed via the social environment (Huitt 1999). In real life, it is noteworthy that people not only set goals and make plans, but also voluntarily change goals and plans. For example, in the process towards achieving a goal, no matter it is a religious, political, educational, career, or marital pursuit, some individuals intend to replace the goal with another. However, previous research ignored that goal may be changed or reconstructed, and has not attempted to identify the influence of the existing behavioral volition on the forming of an alternative goal in the attitude-behavior relationship. In understanding the interplay of conation and goal, the wisdom of Alfred Alder's conative psychology suggests that the goal-setting "is attained through overcoming the resistances with which the environment confronts the organism" (cf. Dyslin 1999, p. 25). Therefore, in order to understand the role of existing behavioral volition as well as the attainment and change of goals, the objective of the paper is to build an extended model on MGB to integrate the conative force into the prediction of goal-directed behavior.

This paper is organized as follows: After the introduction, a review of attitude-behavior models in the literature is provided. Following the literature review, a holistic framework of goal-directed behavior based on the perceptual control theory is presented to broaden the MGB. Contributions and conclusions are provided at the end.

2. REVIEW OF ATTITUDE-BEHAVIOR MODELS

2.1. TRA and TPB

TRA and TPB stem from classical attitude theories. TRA postulates that volitional behavior is primarily determined by behavioral intention, which, in turn, is determined by attitudes toward the behavior and subjective norms (Fishbein and Ajzen 1975; Ajzen and Fishbein 1980) (see Model A in Figure 1). As an attitude-behavior model, "it is intuitive, insightful in its ability to explain behavior, and parsimonious" (Bagozzi 1992, p. 180). TPB is built on the basis of TRA and further incorporates perceived behavioral control, the perceived degree of difficulty by which a particular behavior is likely to be performed, as a motivational antecedent to predict behavioral intention and behavior (Ajzen and Madden 1986; Ajzen 1987) (see Model B in Figure 1).

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TRA and TPB are most suited for explaining and predicting behaviors characterized as "elicited output". "Elicited output" is originally proposed by Hershberger (1987) in the study of volitional behavior. It is a type of behavior that can be represented by a cause-effect relationship between a distal stimulus (an environmental disturbance) and a response (Dyslin 1998). According to Dyslin (1998), under "elicited output", an individual's perceptual control system of behavior forms the system's input by counteracting with environmental disturbances, and the …