Goals

Goals refer to the anything we want to do, be it big or tiny
Their dynamics are to get activated (triggered) into our minds, then they tend to be a bit sticky, and even squelch competing goals, and when they are released we feel good. When blocked we feel frustrated.
A goal can be activated or not at any one time, though some chronic goals can have a status that is somewhat in between – not activated, but easy to trigger
Goals shape our behaviour, prompting us to pursue them, but they also shape our perception, highlighting things that will be helpful towards completing it and blocking out everything else. We will sometimes engage in biased reasoning in which we look for ways to tip our understanding of the world in the direction that our goals would like it to be
Goals sometimes get in each other’s way, but we also build them into helpful hierarchies, in which longer term more abstract goals (which give us a sense of meaning and continuity and organized action) have lower level more concrete sub-goals that guide us to what to do. We can have several layers of this organization.
We tend to be aware that we are pursuing our lower level goals, but we can often be unaware of higher level goals that these are supporting. Market researchers sometimes have to work hard to really map how these connect in consumer’s minds.