How Feedback Influences Persistence, Disengagement, and Change in Goal Pursuit

Feedback is essential for pursuing goals. It enables individuals to adjust their efforts and decide which goals to pursue and which to let go, at least tempo-rarily. Thus, feedback affects goal persistence, disengagement, and change. For example, employers give performance evaluations to help an employee decide how much to invest in her job, and a teacher provides grades to students to help students decide how much effort to devote to studying for an exam. In addition, receiving feedback on one’s current physical state in a medical checkup influences one’s pursuit of health goals, and receiving feedback from close others influences a person’s attention to a friend or a spouse. At certain times, people are more likely to attend to any of these goals after receiving positive feedback than after receiving negative feedback, whereas at other times negative feedback prevails. Accordingly, this chapter examines when and how positive and negative feedback influences goal persistence and when it promotes goal disengagement and change.