The influence of social groups on goal contagion

0022-1031/$ see front matter 2008 Elsevier Inc. A doi:10.1016/j.jesp.2008.07.009 q We thank Robert Arkin, Kentaro Fujita, Richard E. P Cognition Research Group for their helpful comments paper. Special thanks to Pablo Briñol and Travis Julia the experimental videos and Jen Morrison for serving 2b. The work reported in this paper is supported by a Graduate Research Fellowship awarded to the firs Organization for Scientific Research grant (NWO VICI to the second author. * Corresponding author. E-mail address: [email protected] (C. Loersch). Goal contagion is the automatic adoption of a goal upon perceiving another’s goal-directed behavior (Aarts, H., Gollwitzer, P. M., & Hassin, R. R. (2004). Goal contagion: Perceiving is for pursuing. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 87(1), 23–37). This paper tests the hypothesis that goal contagion is more likely between people who belong to the same groups. Because past work on goal contagion has required participants to read about the behavior of others, we also test whether goals are caught when one sees rather than reads about another’s motivated behavior. Across three studies, this ecologically valid methodology reliably produced goal contagion, and this effect was more likely to emerge when participants shared a group membership with those they observed. In Study 1, participants were more likely to take on the goal of individuals who belonged to their same university. Study 2 demonstrated that this effect occurred even when participants were not explicitly focused on the group membership of others. A final study verified that our effects were motivational by demonstrating that failing at a goal relevant task increased negative affect, but only for those who viewed the motivated behavior of someone from their own group. 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.