Goal Management Experiment

This HIT is a psychology experiment being conducted by Falk Lieder, Daniel Reichman and David Bourgin from Professor Tom Griffiths's Computational Cognitive Science Lab at the University of California, Berkeley. In order to consent to participate, you MUST meet the following criteria:

• 18 years of age or older.
• Fluent speaker of English.
• Have not participated in this experiment before.

This study was designed to investigate what determines whether a decision is easy or difficult and how difficulty interacts with motivation.

The study will take about 40 minutes, and will pay $3.25. You can earn a performance dependent bonus of up to $4.

Your participation in this research is voluntary. You may refrain from answering any questions that make you uncomfortable and may withdraw your participation at any time without penalty by returning the HIT on MTurk and emailing the experimenter at the address provided below.

Other than monetary compensation, participating will provide no direct benefits to you. But, we hope that this research will benefit society at large. Many problems that people can solve very easily are very difficult to automate (to have computers solve). By revealing more about how humans learn and think, our research may help others to build and program computers that can solve these kinds of problems.

Your MTurk worker ID may be connected to individual responses, but we will not be asking for any additional personally identifying information, and we will handle responses as confidentially as possible. We cannot however guarantee the confidentiality of information transmitted over the Internet. We will be keeping data collected as part of this experiment indefinitely.

If you have any questions about the study, feel free to contact Falk Lieder. He can be reached at falk.lieder@berkeley.edu. If you have concerns about your rights as a participant in this experiment, please contact UC Berkeley's Committee for Protection of Human Subjects at (510) 642-7461 or subjects@berkeley.edu.

By selecting the "consent" option below, I acknowledge that I am 18 or older, that I am a fluent speaker of English, that I have not completed this experiment before, that I have read this consent form, and that I agree to take part in the research.

John has many goals. One of them is to earn more money and another one is to get in shape. There are several things he could do to pursue his goals. Some of these activities achieve multiple goals at once. For instance, volunteering to improve his company's website would accomplish three of his goals: learning to code, improving his relationship with his boss, and earning extra money. Each activity that he is considering takes about the same amount of time and effort. John does not want to do any of these activities unless it is necessary to achieve his goals. Please click "Start" to help John achieve all of his goals with as few activities as possible. Start

Congratulations, you have earned a bonus of $0. Your responses will help us to understand better what makes it difficult to achieve one's goals. Finally, please answer the following questions.

1. How old are you?     years.
2. Which gender do you identify with?   
3. What is your first language?