Goals, Expectations, and Performance

People and organizations often set goals to self-motivate and achieve better outcomes in challenging tasks. But goals, and their effectiveness, might depend on what people expect to happen. Do goals reflect expectations or do goals set expectations? How do goals and expectations affect performance? These distinctions are important for motivation and intervention design. We run an online real-effort task to answer these two questions by introducing exogenous variation in goals and expectations. First, we find that goals mostly reflect existing expectations rather than set expectations. Second, practicing an easier version of a task leads to higher expectations and higher performance. Eliciting a goal leads to higher performance as well. However, controlling for expectations, changing the difficulty of the goal has no discernible effect. These results suggest that people benefit from being optimistic and setting a goal, but they cannot fool themselves into expecting and doing more simply by choosing a higher goal.