ABSTRACT
There are difficulties with translating good intentions into action. According to the European Commission, only 20% of Europeans said that they did not exercise regularly because they lacked the motivation or they were not interested. The implication is that having a strong intention to be physically active regularly or to score a goal in a penalty shoot-out and sticking to that intention are two different ballgames. This chapter describes the distinction between motivation and volition that is made in several models of behaviours. Experiments show that people engage in different thought processes when making a decision to act as opposed to ensuring that the decision is acted upon. The chapter focuses on the specific case of cue-dependent planning and identifies avenues for future research and practice. The cue-dependent plan can be formed by the participant him/herself or it can be assigned by the experimenter or healthcare staff, for example.
