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. Third, eliciting a goal also leads to higher average performance, and changing the goal level has local effects that pull people toward the goal. However, revising goals has little effect on average performance. Our findings imply that increasing expectations is an important motivating tool that increases goals and performance. Having any goal helps performance; however, people cannot fool themselves into expecting and doing more simply by choosing a different goal.

This paper was accepted by John Beshears, behavioral economics and decision analysis.

Funding: Financial support from the University of California San Diego Academic Senate and the Willard Graham Research Fund at Chicago Booth is gratefully acknowledged.

Supplemental Material: The online appendix and data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2025.00480.