Motivation in a Social Context: Coordinating Personal and Shared Goal Pursuits With Others

This article reviews research on motivation in a social context. We first explore pursuit of personal goals and how information on others, as well as the presence of others, influences motivation. We next explore pursuit of group goals, including pursuit of goals alone for the self and others, and pursuit of shared goals together with others. Across these various domains, we identify coordination as the underlying principle for pursuing goals in a social context. We show that individuals' tendency to coordinate their actions with others leads to a variety of phenomena, including conformity, divergence, shared reality, jointly maximizing choice, and highlighting versus balancing group actions. We further show that coordination increases with interpersonal closeness but is not limited to close friends.