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In addition to the team's shared goals, team members also often hold goals unrelated to the team. Research about such goals, which we call "extra-team goals" (ETGs), has been limited. In the current research, we examine how awareness of a team member's ETGs affects team outcomes. A laboratory experiment examines the effects of disclosure of different types of ETGs by one team member (target) on team performance, team viability, and team satisfaction while engaging in a brainstorming task. Our findings suggest that there are significant positive effects of ETG disclosure on team performance, team viability, and team satisfaction, and that these effects are mediated by perceptions of the target's commitment to the team's goal., Competing Interests: The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest., (Copyright © 2021 Sackett and Fitzsimons.)

Three studies demonstrate a novel phenomenon--self-regulatory outsourcing--in which thinking about how other people can be instrumental (i.e., helpful) for a given goal undermines motivation to expend effort on that goal. In Experiment 1, participants who thought about how their partner helped them with health goals (as opposed to career goals) planned to spend less time and effort on health goals in the upcoming week. This pattern was stronger for depleted participants than for nondepleted participants. In Experiment 2, participants who thought about how their partner helped them with academic-achievement goals procrastinated more, leaving themselves less time for an academic task, than did participants in two control conditions. This pattern was stronger for participants who were told that procrastinating would drain their resources for the academic task than for participants who were told that procrastinating would not drain their resources for that task. In Experiment 3, participants who decreased their effort after thinking of an instrumental significant other reported higher relationship commitment to that individual than did participants who did not decrease their effort. The possibility for shared (or transactive) self-regulation is discussed.

Past research has demonstrated that people's need to perceive the world as fair and just leads them to blame and derogate victims of tragedy. The research reported here shows that a positive reaction--bestowing additional meaning on the lives of individuals who have suffered--can also serve people's need to believe that the world is just. In two studies, participants whose justice motive was temporarily heightened or who strongly endorsed the belief that reward and punishment are fairly distributed in the world perceived more meaning and enjoyment in the life of someone who had experienced a tragedy than in the life of someone who had not experienced tragedy, but this pattern was not found for participants whose justice motive was not heightened or who did not strongly endorse a justice belief. These results suggest that being motivated to see the world as just--a motivation traditionally associated with victim derogation--also leads people to perceive a "silver lining" to tragic events.

How do everyday goals shape the way people categorize others in the social environment? Research on social categorization has emphasized the role of feature-based categories such as race and gender, showing that people rely on such categories when perceiving and remembering others. We tested the hypothesis that social perception may depend on a new type of category--what we call "goal instrumentality," or the extent to which others are useful for an active goal. We demonstrate that people make more memory errors within the categories of "instrumental" and "noninstrumental," and fewer between-category errors, when a goal has been subtly activated. We also demonstrate that people perceive others within the categories of "instrumental" and "noninstrumental" to be more similar, and others from the two different categories to be less similar, following subliminal goal activation. We discuss implications for the understanding of social categorization and the influence of goals on social cognition.