
SITUATED
GOAL PURSUIT LAB
LATEST NEWS

Congratulations to Ariel on Passing her Qualification Exam with Flying Colors
One of our PhD students, Ariel, recently passed her qualifying examinations (QEs) and is now en route to completing her dissertation over the next two years as an official PhD candidate. Congrats on passing her QEs!
See what Ariel says after passing her QE here.
Our research on strategic indulgence is covered by The Guardian.
Is a bit of indulgence a secret to success? Past research and laymen's wisdom have long exalted the virtue of self-restraint. In the age of excess, however, staying from daily temptations may be neither feasible nor desirable. A recent article published in The Guardian covered some of the lab’s research on how people strategically incorporate indulgence into their long-term pursuits.
Find out more about the related journal article here.


Lile Leads a Large-Scale Study to Understand Psychological, Social and Behavioural Determinants of Health
We are pleased to announce that Lile is leading the Baseline Study for the Health District @Queenstown, which has received generous funding from the NUS President and Provost (S$4,499,950). Lile is thrilled to work with two seasoned researchers in this multi-disciplinary project: Associate Professor Lim Yee Wei from the Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine and Professor Leonard Lee from the NUS Business School and Lloyd’s Register Foundation Institute for the Public Understanding of Risks. Hee Seng, another member of the SPUR Lab, has also joined the project as a Research Assistant.
Learn more about our aims and research plan here.

ABOUT
Goals are desirable end states people want to maintain (e.g., staying healthy) or achieve (e.g., academic excellence).
More often than not, people pursue important goals in various intrapersonal (e.g., temptations, prior goal pursuit efforts) and interpersonal (e.g., others’ goal pursuit, social interaction) contexts. Consistent with the perspective of situated social cognition (Smith & Semin, 2004), our lab examines how the various aspects of the goal pursuit process are dynamically shaped by the relevant context.