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Self-concordant goals breed goal-optimism and thus well-being

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Abstract

Self-concordant goals are goals which represent a people’s enduring interests and self-defining values (Sheldon, 2002). People pursuing more self-concordant goals evidence higher subjective well-being, as shown in participants from both Western and non-Western cultures (Sheldon et al., 2004). In a different literature, attributional style research has found that tendencies to provide optimistic explanations of life events also predict well-being. We hypothesized that people pursuing self-concordant goals would make more optimistic attributions about goal-specific outcomes, and that this tendency would help explain the link between self-concordance and well-being. Structural equation and multiple group modelling of 253 American and 230 Russian university students found support for these hypotheses. Self-concordance primarily predicted optimism following positive outcomes (that they will recur), not following negative outcomes (that they will end), and also, the mediational pattern was slightly different in the Russian than in the American sample. The results suggest that when people choose life-goals that fit their interests and values, they derive resources including the ability to interpret positive goal-outcomes in an optimistic way. This helps to explain why pursuing such goals makes them happy.

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Funding

The paper was supported by the Russian Academic Excellence Project ‘5–100’.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Missouri, Columbia, MO, 65211, USA

    Kennon Sheldon & Liudmila Titova

  2. Higher School of Economics, Moscow, Russia

    Kennon Sheldon, Tamara Gordeeva & Evgeny Osin

  3. Lomonosov Moscow State University, Moscow, Russia

    Tamara Gordeeva

  4. Altai State University for Humanities, Barnaul, Altai Krai, Russia

    Oleg Sychev

  5. Elon University, Elon, NC, 27244, USA

    Liudmila Titova

Authors
  1. Kennon Sheldon
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  2. Tamara Gordeeva
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  3. Oleg Sychev
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  4. Evgeny Osin
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  5. Liudmila Titova
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Correspondence to Kennon Sheldon.

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Ethical Approval Statement

The studies have been approved by Institutional Review Board of University of Missouri (FWA Number 00002876, IRB Registration Numbers: 00000731, 00009014). IRB Project Number 2011114, IRB Review Number 259122.

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Sheldon, K., Gordeeva, T., Sychev, O. et al. Self-concordant goals breed goal-optimism and thus well-being. Curr Psychol 41, 6549–6557 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-020-01156-7

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