Perceiving value in obligations and goals: Wanting to do what should be done

Four studies investigated the perception of autonomous motives for obligati ons-of "wants" in activities regarded as "shoulds." In Study 1, respondents provided their reasons for engaging in self-generated obligations, whereas in Study 2, the experimenter provided the obligations. In both studies, pa rticipants spontaneously gave few autonomous motives, but their frequency w as associated with respondents' life satisfaction, and virtually all were a ble to generate autonomous motives when these were elicited. Study 3 found a strong positive correlation between perceptions of wants and shoulds in p articipants' goals. A mediational model found that both wants and shoulds h ad direct, but opposite, effects on life satisfaction but only wants predic ted goal success, the strongest path to life satisfaction. In Study 4, an a ppreciation-focus (vs. a resentment-focus or no specific emotion-focus) led to the perception of shoulds as wants in goal conflict situations; open-en ded responses provided some clues to this transformation process.