Abstract
There is an emerging debate around the idea that goals can shape perceptual experiences, guiding people to act in a goal-directed manner. The degree to which a person’s motivation for goal striving is derived from internal versus external sources and aligns with their values, beliefs, and self-concept (i.e., self-concordance) plays an important role in determining successful goal pursuit but has been an overlooked factor in the research surrounding goal-driven perceptual phenomena. In the present experiment n = 66 participants determined whether stimuli depicting crowds of moving people contained 10 or more individuals. We assigned participants to either a threat-goal condition, emphasizing the potential for threat in large crowds, or a control condition which had no additional justification for the task. We measured goal self-concordance for the task and manipulated both the size of the crowd and the proportion of individuals in the crowd performing threatening actions across trials. Self-concordance predicted less accurate responding, with participants over-estimating small crowds and under-estimating large crowds. Additionally, participants with self-concordant motivation in the threat-goal condition had faster reaction times and were less influenced by task instructions. Our findings suggest that the self-concordance of motivation for a task may influence the way participants respond to stimuli, rather than the way they perceive them.