The mind is claimed to operate as a goal-seeking machine that will find the route automatically once the target is set clearly.
Maltz took the guided-missile servomechanism as his model of mind: set the target, and error-correction handles the rest. The metaphor is vivid, and the inference from an engineering system to a nervous system is unearned. Implementation intentions are the researched technique in this space, and they work by specifying the route rather than by trusting it to be found.
In practice
- A goal set clearly and never planned produces clarity about the goal and no route to it.
- A person who specifies the trigger and the response acts; one who holds a vivid target does not.
- Possible explanations
- The explanation offered is an analogy from control engineering: set the target and error-correction finds the route. A more defensible version is goal priming, in which an active goal changes what a person notices and pursues without deliberate attention.
- In its favour
- Goal priming and automatic goal pursuit are real and measured, and clear goals do improve performance in goal-setting research.
- Against it
- The servomechanism is an analogy presented as a mechanism, minds do not have a defined error signal for most goals, and the evidence is testimonial and selected on success.
- Standing
- Testimonial evidence selected on success, with no comparison group. An analogy from control engineering presented as a mechanism. Research on nonconscious goal pursuit finds real but far weaker effects, and much of that literature has itself had replication difficulties.
- Subject
- Psychology & Behavior
- Essay
- Theories of the mind, from the lab to the bookshop