In this chapter, the authors describe a research program premised on the notion that the cognitive treatment affords conceptual and methodological advantages enabling new insights into problems of motivated action, self-regulation and self-control. They introduce placing their work in the broader historical context of social psychological theorizing about motivation and cognition. The authors present theoretical notions and trace their implications for a variety of psychological issues including activity experience, goal commitment, choice, and substitution. They also describe empirical research concerning a broad range of phenomena informed by the goal-systemic analysis. Two categories of cognitive properties play a major role in the behavior of goal systems: these are their structural and their allocational properties. The number of goals linked to a given means defines the multifinality set encapsulated in the notion of "many birds with one stone". Understanding the dynamics of commitment may improve our ability to foster commitment to realistic goals, and to reduce commitment to unattainable or unrealistic pursuits.
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