ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the program of research on multiple-goal message production conducted within the action assembly theory framework. Action assembly theory has served to direct attention to the temporal characteristics of multiple-goal messages. These message features are seen not only to have social significance by virtue of the fact that they are related to social perception and attributions, but also to provide a window on cognitive encoding processes. From the perspective of action assembly theory, messages aimed at accomplishing multiple social objectives are formulated through the same processes of activation and assembly that are held to underlie all behavioral production. The specific characteristics of these processes have been used to derive a number of hypotheses concerning the temporal features of messages produced under various goal instruction sets. The bulk of this chapter reviews the experimental tests of these hypotheses, summarizes the pattern of empirical findings across multiple studies, and traces the theoretical implications of these findings.
