Goals and Intentions: The Method of Self-Organization

This chapter focuses on Level 3 of Fig. 3.3, the realm of goals, tasks, intentions, concerns, projects, and purposes. This is a large area of personality theory, including of all of the many attempts to deal theoretically with the fact that people are intentional actors, proactively shaping their environments and lives. This domain potentially includes the achievement motivation and test anxiety literature; the intrinsic and extrinsic motivation literature; the goal-setting and personal goal literatures; the European action theory literature; the social-cognitive literature; and many other literatures besides.