Abstract

PSYCHOLOGICAL INQUIRY 2019, VOL. 30, NO. 3, 151–154 https://doi.org/10.1080/1047840X.2019.1646053 A Stroll through the Garden of “Goodness” and “Badness”: The Goal Systemic View on the Value of Actions and Outcomes a,b b Ewa Szumowska and Arie W. Kruglanski a b Institute of Psychology, Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Krakow, Poland; Department of Psychology, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland Often, psychologists anoint some phenomena or processes “goal system” is a hierarchical representation with a supreme as “good” and disparage others as “bad.” In a sense, this is goal (or basic need) at the top of the hierarchy served by a what the public expects from “experts”: To tell them what is number of subgoals in turn served by their means, and so “good” or “bad,” or what to do in order to attain good out- on (Kruglanski et al., 2002, 2015). This conception echoes comes and/or avoid bad outcomes. For instance, extraver- Scholer et al.’s distinction between systemic, strategic, and sion is generally considered better than introversion (e.g., tactical levels in which the systemic level consists of Barrick, Stewart, Neubert, & Mount, 1998; DeNeve & (supreme) goals or needs, whereas the strategic and tactical Cooper, 1998), systematic processing better than heuristic