‘The Ostrich Problem’: motivated avoidance or rejection of information about goal progress

By Thomas Llewelyn Webb, Betty Chang, Yael Benn. 2013

138 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Monitoring one’s current standing with respect to goals can promote effective self-regulation. However, the present review suggests that there is an ostrich problem such that, in many instances, people have a tendency to “bury their head in the sand” and intentionally avoid or reject information that would help them to monitor their goal progress. For example, people with diabetes avoid monitoring their blood glucose, and few people monitor their household energy consumption, check their bank balances, keep track of what they are eating and so on. While situational constraints can explain some problems with progress monitoring, we use a self-motives framework to posit that the decision to avoid monitoring often represents the product of an interaction between different motives. For example, the desire to accurately assess progress may conflict with the desire to protect or enhance the self. The present review collates evidence pertaining to the ostrich problem, identifies different motives that underlie the decision to monitor versus not monitor goal progress, illustrates how the ostrich problem might be integrated into models of self-regulation, and provides suggestions for future research. In so doing, the review advances our understanding of the nature and determinants of intentionally deficient monitoring.

Subfields: Applied Psychology, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/413ae737961cdd1cccca451478552d078e889ef0

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In Applied Psychology

In Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

In Sociology and Political Science

Citations in the corpus

Antecedents and consequences of monitoring domestic electricity consumption (2014, background): “Anticipating that monitoring will lead to negative emotions also made it less likely that people would intend to monitor in the future; a finding that may support the idea that there are times when people avoid monitoring in order to protect the self (Webb et al., 2013).”