Thoughts About Actions and Outcomes: (And What They Lead to)

Abstract

The idea that actions and their outcomes are mentally represented as associative knowledge structures has been influential in social psychology and motivation science. Among others, it suggests that thinking of, perceiving, or activating outcome representations in any other way can lead to the activation of associated action representations, triggering goal-directed action. In the current article, I critically examine the existing evidence for such ideomotor action. I argue that the evidence for ideomotor action obtained by the dominant paradigms in the field is open to alternative interpretations and present evidence suggesting that ideomotor action could also result from causal models about actions and outcomes rather than only from mere associations between their representations. I conclude that as a result, ideomotor action may be much more situated and flexible than previously thought, which has consequences for our thinking about goal-directed action.