Implementation Intentions

Intention formation is an important prerequisite of action because planning implies to establishing behavioral strategies which are utilized to attain a goal. Therefore, various behavioral scripts, tactics, and alternatives are considered that help decide which intentions are favored over others (Austin & Vancouver, 1996).

One kind of planning involves the formation of implementation intentions as Gollwitzer identified them in his theory of intentional action control (Gollwitzer, 1993, 1999). Provided that people feel a strong commitment towards their goal and are highly motivated to achieve their goal (Gollwitzer, 2006), implementation intentions have been shown to be a powerful self-regulation strategy helping people achieve their goals even under adverse conditions (e.g., low processing capacity or low self-regulation; for summaries, see Achtziger & Gollwitzer, 2007;

Gollwitzer & Sheeran, 2006). Although an implementation intention is subordinate to a goal intention, it is much more effective and less resource consuming. It specifies when, where, and how goal-directed behavior should be initiated by defining a specific situation (external or

internal) and linking it to a concrete term of action. It thereby takes the form: “If I encounter situation X, then I will do Y.” For example, by holding the goal of becoming a famous piano player (“I want to become a famous piano player”), the appropriate implementation intention might be: “If I have finished eating dinner in the evening, then I will practice the piano for at least two hours.”

Effects of implementation intentions supporting goal striving have not only been found in basic research studies, but also in many applied studies in various fields (e.g., health care, sports, clinical disorders; e.g., Abraham, Sheeran, Norman, Conner, de Vries, & Otten, 1999; Achtziger, Gollwitzer, & Sheeran, 2008; Bayer & Gollwitzer, 2007; Lengfelder & Gollwitzer, 2001;

Michalski, 2004; Paul, Gawrilow, Zech, Gollwitzer, Rockstroh, Odenthal, Kratzer, & Wienbruch, 2007). For instance, Luszczynska, Sobczyk, and Abraham (2007) found in a study on weight reduction that women who supported their goal of losing weight with an additionally implementation intention lost significantly more weight than participants in the control group.

1.3.2.2 Processing of implementation intentions

The structure of implementation intentions as if-then plans, which serves two different functions facilitate the activation of goal attainment. In the ‘if-component’, a specific internal or external situation or cue is determined. This is assumed to create a highly activated mental representation of this situation making it cognitively easier to access and thereby consuming very little cognitive resources if any (Gollwitzer, 1999; Gollwitzer, Bayer, & McCulloch, 2005). This again facilitates attention allocation to and better recall of the situation that was defined in the implementation intention. Additionally, the specified situation is detected faster than incoherent situations (cf. Achtziger & Gollwitzer, 2005).

Moreover, other classical studies (e.g., Malzacher, 1992; Steller, 1992) such as Aarts, Dijksterhuis, and Midden (1999) have demonstrated the cognitive availability of the specified situation defined in an implementation intention. Responses to words related to a plan (implementation intention vs. unrelated planning condition) in a lexical decision task were reliably faster for participants in the implementation intention condition than participants in the control condition. Thus, without being aware of it, target words were recognized faster and thus were more cognitively accessible for participants who had formulated an implementation intention.

This shows that the mental representation of the specified cue becomes highly activated and thus is more easily accessible as soon as the critical situation, defined in the if-part of the implementation intention, is encountered (Gollwitzer, 1999).

In the ‘then-component’ of the implementation intention, a certain plan has already been defined to guide future behavior. It is no longer necessary to deliberate about the pros and cons

of the current goal, whether there are other more urgent goals to strive for, one needs to consider how this goal could be achieved, or what kind of obstacles have to be overcome, and so forth.

Thus, if the specified situation is encountered, the intended action can be implemented immediately (Gollwitzer & Brandstätter, 1997), efficiently (Brandstaetter, Lengfelder, &

Gollwitzer, 2001) and without conscious intent (Bayer, Achtziger, Gollwitzer, & Moskowitz, accepted). This is referred to as the strategic automaticity of implementation intentions (e.g., Gollwitzer & Schaal, 1998; Gollwitzer, Fujita, & Oettingen, 2004).

By being activated on an unconscious level and without cognitive resources, implementation intentions are appropriate for supporting resource consuming goal attainment processes. By planning when, where, and how to achieve a goal, implementation intentions create associative strengths that are comparable to habitual behavior (Aarts & Dijksterhuis, 2000b). It is not necessary to repeatedly perform an action to establish a habit, it is sufficient to commit oneself one time to an implementation intention in a single act of will to support goal attainment successfully (cf. Aarts & Dijksterhuis, 2000b; Gollwitzer & Schaal, 1998).

The efficiency of implementation intentions can be shown very effectively in dual-task paradigms in which participants have to conduct two concurrent tasks simultaneously. If the performance of one task is worse under dual task conditions compared to accomplishing only one task at a time, the task is said to demand cognitive resources (Brandstaetter et al., 2001;

Macrae et al., 1994). Thus, if an implementation intention can enhance task performance despite cognitive load, then this is an evidence of its strategic automaticity. Brandstaetter and her colleagues (2001) verified this in two studies in which cognitive load was induced experimentally:

Participants furnished with an implementation intention responded faster to critical stimuli presented by a go/no-go task than participants in a control condition, independent of cognitive load.

In the stereotyping field, Achtziger (2003) was the first to examine the effects of implementation intentions on the processing of stereotype-inconsistent information under cognitive load. She found that participants who were set under cognitive load and were furnished with an implementation intention could recall stereotype-inconsistent information better than participants with a mere goal intention of being open-minded or no intention at all. Thus, her results supported the hypothesis that effects of implementation intentions are independent from the cognitive resources of working memory.

In her dissertation, Achtziger (2003) developed a model to explain the effects of implementation intentions on the basis of different two-process models (Hommel, 2000; Zorzi &

Umiltá, 1995), namely the model of intentional action control by Gollwitzer (Gollwitzer, 1993, 1999), and the automotive model by Bargh (1989). By holding an implementation intention, a

specific intentional task setting is implemented which determines how to react (then-part) to distinct kinds of stimuli or situations (if-part). To continue on this road, as soon as the specified situation or stimulus is encountered, the respective behavior is activated in a goal dependent and automatic manner. Nevertheless, this route is only temporarily active as long as the implementation intention could not be executed. Moreover, there are not only intentional information processing routes in a task setting, but also routes that are automatically activated and exist in the form of associations between stimuli and reactions. They are present over an extended time period and one can repeatedly access them. Yet, these are automatic processes that are preconscious (Bargh, 1989) and cannot be unconsciously activated in response to a certain cue in the same way as implementation intentions (Achtziger, Bayer, & Gollwitzer, under review).

Furthermore, Achtziger (2003) refers in her model to studies completed by Achtziger, Bayer, and Gollwitzer (accepted) who demonstrated that information that is necessary for the realization of the implementation intention is highly activated while information that is unimportant for the realization or even hindering is suppressed.