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Detour to Arrive: Distancing in Service of Approach Goals

Jens Frster and Ronald S. Friedman
Emotion Review 2013 5: 259
DOI: 10.1177/1754073913477502
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477502
2013

EMR5310.1177/1754073913477502Emotion ReviewFrster and Friedman Short Title

Detour to Arrive: Distancing in Service of

Approach Goals

Emotion Review
Vol. 5, No. 3 (July 2013) 259263
The Author(s) 2013
ISSN 1754-0739
DOI: 10.1177/1754073913477502
er.sagepub.com

Jens Frster

Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Ronald S. Friedman

Department of Psychology, University at Albany, USA

Abstract
Although in most situations approaching desired end-states entails decreasing distance between oneself and an object, and
avoiding undesired end-states increases such distance, in some cases distancing can also be a means to approach a given goal. We
highlight examples involving responses to obstacles to achievement and self-control dilemmas, showing that motivational direction
is not equivalent to the motivational strategy involved when people pursue their goals.

Keywords
approach, avoidance, distance, goals

What is painful is avoided and what is pleasant is pursued

Aristotle, De Motu Animalium

According to both classic Lewinian (Lewin, 1935) as well as current perspectives, approach motivation is the energization of
behavior by, or the direction of behavior toward, positive stimuli
(objects, events, possibilities), whereas avoidance motivation is the
energization of behavior by, or the direction of behavior away
from, negative stimuli (Elliott, 2006, p. 111). Given this conceptualization, it naturally follows that approach motions result in a
decrease in distance between oneself and the object, whereas
avoidance motions result in an increase in that distance (Seibt,
Neumann, Nussinson, & Strack, 2008, p. 713; emphasis in original). However, whereas this assumption, which has provided a
foundation for measuring approach versus avoidance motives, may
appear to be a truism, there are in fact important exceptions to the
rule, namely, cases in which people increase distance, either physically or psychologically, in order to approach a desired end-state.

Measuring Approach versus Avoidance Based

on Distancing
Again, researchers in numerous subfields of psychology
have operationalized approach behavior as reducing distance
towards positives and avoidance behavior as increasing distance

to negatives. For instance, in his classic study on goal gradients,

Brown (1948) trained one group of hungry rats to run down a
short alley to attain food. Each rat wore a harness connected to a
recording device such that the strength of its pull when stopped
at a specific point in the alley could be measured in grams. Using
the same device, the strength of avoidance behavior was reflected
in the strength with which rats ran away to escape electric shocks.
Likewise, social psychologists have used the physical distance
between people as a measure of approach (liking) or avoidance
(disliking) tendencies. To illustrate, Macrae, Bodenhausen,
Milne, and Jetten (1994) invited participants to take a seat in a
row of eight chairs in which items from either a liked ingroup
member or a disliked outgroup member were placed on the end
chair. Seating position on one of the seven empty seats was then
used as a behavioral measure of approach versus avoidance
motives based on the observation that participants would typically sit closer to (i.e., approach) an ingroup members chair and
farther from that of an outgroup member. Aron, Aron, and
Smollan (1992) have similarly measured intimacy in close relationships by observing how closely participants situate two
figures symbolizing themselves and a target person.
Correspondingly, embodiment researchers have used arm
movements of pushing and pulling as even more implicit
indices of approach versus avoidance tendencies. In an early
study, participants were required to pull/push cards on which
pleasant or unpleasant words were printed either towards or

Corresponding author: Jens Frster, Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences, University of Amsterdam, Weesperplein 4, Amsterdam 1018 XA, The Netherlands.
Email: j.a.forster@uva.nl

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260 Emotion Review Vol. 5 No. 3

away from themselves (Solarz, 1960). Results showed that participants were faster at pulling pleasant words towards themselves than unpleasant words. In contrast, they were faster at
pushing unpleasant words away from themselves than pleasant
words. These results were conceptually replicated by Chen and
Bargh (1999). They found the same pattern even when participants were not explicitly asked to evaluate the stimuli but were,
in a between-subjects design, asked to either always push levers
away from or pull levers towards positive and negative words. In
a similar vein researchers manipulated rudimentary approach
versus avoidance by asking participants to step back from versus
towards a computer screen before solving tasks (Koch, Holland,
Hengstler, & van Knippenberg, 2009). Presumably, underlying
such effects is a generalized conditioning process, enabling people to automatically seek distance from undesirable and potentially dangerous events and seeking closeness to desirable and
appetitive stimuli (Cacioppo, Priester, & Berntson, 1993).
Similarly, researchers have primed mental representations of
approach versus avoidance motives by creating illusions of
motion in space. For instance, Neumann and Strack (2000) provided participants with the visual impression that they were moving either toward or away from a negative or positive word
presented on the computer screen. Participants were tasked with
indicating whether words presented were positive or negative.
Results showed that participants were faster at categorizing negative words when they appeared to be moving away from the
screen, whereas they were faster at categorizing positive words
when they appeared to be moving toward the screen. In sum,
there is an extensive tradition in psychology of conceptualizing
approach versus avoidance tendencies in terms of increasing versus reducing distance to desired versus undesired objects or
events. However, whereas this link may represent the rule in
many if not most situations, it is also important to explore its
exceptions in order to forge a deeper understanding of the
psychological impact of approach and avoidance states.

When Distancing Means Approaching

Desired End-States
Although infrequently recognized, individuals often seek a distance from a desired end-state in order to ultimately approach it.
For instance, in order to find a viable approach to solving a
complex or hitherto intractable problem, people may need to
step back from it so as to see it from a broader perspective and
thereby find a new means of attack. As another example, in selfcontrol dilemmas, people may approach the overarching goal of
losing weight primarily via seeking distance from temptations
such as fattening food. A great deal of research has recently illuminated such ways in which individuals may focus on detouring
away from a particular object or state in order to obtain or arrive
at a higher-order goal object or desired state.

Obstacles
Recent studies have examined the benefits of distancing
when people experience obstacles during goal pursuit. In many

real-life situations, obstacles arise during goal pursuit. Such

interfering forces often times come out of the blue and a new
strategy or solution has to be developed. Marguc and colleagues
argued that such problem solving in the face of obstacles can be
supported by automatic processes of psychological distancing
(Marguc, Frster, & van Kleef, 2011). Building upon Lewins
field theory (1935), they argued that a person confronted with
an obstacle essentially has two options: She can leave the field,
that is, disengage from the goal or task at hand, or stay on track
and try to overcome the obstacle. While the former case would
reflect avoidance behavior, the latter is approach. In this latter
case, a novel event changes the meaning of the field and thus the
solution would occur by means of restructuring of the field
and perceiving the total situation such that the path to the goal
becomes a unitary whole (Lewin, 1935, p. 83). In other words,
a global processing mode (Frster & Dannenberg, 2010) which
allows for a more encompassing or global view of the situation
including the goal, the obstacle and the relation between the
two, may help to reconfigure elements of the problematic situation and integrate the obstacle into goal pursuit. Critically,
achieving this new, broader perspective involves detaching
from current assumptions and interpretations of the problem
and potentially from the motivational pull of the goal itself
without, however, actually disengaging (Lewin, 1935).
Because global processing might generally help to deal with
obstacles, Marguc and colleagues (2011) suggested that people
implicitly learn about this relation, and represent it in memory
as a generalized routine, so that respective processes would be
automatically elicited when obstacles occur (see Liberman,
Trope, & Stephan, 2007). In an extensive research program,
using a wide variety of obstacles (such as distracting noise
while participants were solving anagrams, imagining the biggest possible obstacle that might interfere with reaching the
goal of studying, or navigating a computer figure through a
maze with or without encountering obstacles), the authors
could show that compared to participants who did not experience obstacles, participants confronted with obstacles engaged
in forms of global processing, including broadening of mental
categories and activation of remote exemplars. To illustrate,
participants had to navigate a figure through a maze; in one
condition an obstacle occurred, whereas in the other there was
no obstacle. Next, in an allegedly unrelated task, they received
instructions for a version of the Remote Associates Test (RAT)
used by Kray, Galinsky, and Wong (2006). In each trial, participants saw three words on the screen (e.g., envy, golf,
beans) and were asked to find a fourth word that connects
them all (e.g., green). Such a task profits from a broad activation of remote and abstract concepts as this allows for finding
an overarching commonality (Friedman & Frster, 2010). As
predicted, participants who had encountered an obstacle were
better at solving such problems than those who did not encounter an obstacle.
In some experiments, Marguc etal. (2011) also measured
participants engagement in the task, to examine the hypothesis
that effects should be especially pronounced for highly engaged
participants. It has been proposed that individuals chronically
differ in their volatility, their likelihood of disengaging from a

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Frster & Friedman Detour to Arrive 261

task (Kuhl, 1994). Consistent with hypotheses, experiments

assessing participants volatility showed that highly engaged
(low volatility) participants were more likely to accept fringe
exemplars into categories (e.g., accepting a camel into the
category vehicles; see Rosch, 1975) when exposed to obstacles than participants not engaged in the task (high volatility) or
those who were not exposed to obstacles. These studies could be
replicated when volatility was primed by exposing participants
to statements reflecting low (e.g., When Im watching an
enthralling movie, I wouldnt even think of doing something
else) or high volatility (e.g., Even the most enthralling movie
doesnt stop me from getting up and doing something else for a
while). Also with this manipulation, performance in the RAT
was best when highly engaged (i.e., low volatility) participants
encountered obstacles (e.g., were stopped by blocking signs
when leading a cartoon figure out of a maze). Again, these
results are consistent with the notion that encountering obstacles led engaged participants, those with stronger approach
motives to solve the problem, to mentally withdraw from initial
problem representations and strategies and to thereby open
themselves to new problem construals and tactics. Meta
phorically speaking, it is as if they retreated to a higher vantage
point to gain a broader perspective on a conflict roiling below.
A subsequent set of studies by Marguc, van Kleef, and
Frster (2012) more directly examined the suggested automatic
link between obstacles and psychological distancing (i.e.,
increasing the space between oneself and another person or
object) as proposed by Lewin (1935). In one study, the authors
asked participants to estimate the distance from their current
position (Amsterdam) to a different place (the city of Rosendaal;
see Liberman & Frster, 2009). If participants have indeed mentally represented a link between obstacles and distancing, then
this might automatically lead, via priming, to higher estimates
of the distance between themselves and other places upon
encountering an obstacle. In the experiment, participants had to
imagine driving to a birthday party and to then either imagine
that a fallen tree blocked their way (the obstacle condition) or to
simply imagine a fallen tree blocking a different street (the noobstacle condition). They were then asked to do an unrelated
task and to estimate the distance between the cities of
Amsterdam and Roosendaal. Participants who had imagined an
obstacle estimated that Roosendaal was farther away than did
those who had not experienced an obstacle.
In a different study, participants had to imagine personal
goals. In addition, in the obstacle condition they had to imagine
the biggest obstacle that might interfere with this goal. In the
no-obstacle condition participants had to imagine how to reach
their goal. In an allegedly unrelated task, participants had to
estimate the font size of letters presented on the computer
screen. Here, distancing would imply perceiving smaller letters,
mimicking the experience that letters look smaller the farther
one stands away from them. Indeed, the data showed that participants estimated smaller font sizes when they had previously
imagined an obstacle, compared to the no-obstacle condition. In
this experiment, participants engagement in the task was also
measured (this time by using a locomotion scale developed by
Kruglanski etal., 2000). Similar to the studies reported earlier,

the effects of obstacles on distance were only shown for highly

engaged participants. In a third study, researchers primed volatility using the aforementioned manipulation with which the
RAT was employed and showed that the distance between the
current place (the lab) and a distant one (central station) was
estimated as larger when highly engaged participants had previously encountered an obstacle, compared with highly engaged
participants not exposed to an obstacle or with participants low
in engagement.
To summarize, the studies suggest that obstacles during goal
pursuit engender psychological distancing, which may be manifested in higher estimates of physical distance as well as in the
broadened conceptual processing and concomitant receptivity
to novel perspectives posited to accompany withdrawal from
current problem representations. It is difficult to conceptualize
these manifestations of psychological distancing here merely as
avoidance behavior, because the effects mainly occurred for
participants who were highly engaged in attaining the goal, that
is, for those who did not want to leave the field, who were
approach-motivated to solve the problem at hand, and who
either explicitly or implicitly used mental distancing as a means
to attain their overarching goal. In such cases, individuals seem
to resemble viewers of a pointillist painting who need to step
backward in order to perceive the scenes depicted by the artist.
However, despite their outward avoidance, they are in fact
approaching a desired end-state.

Self-control
Distancing in service of approach goals may also occur when
people engage in self-control. People sometimes experience conflicts between temptations (e.g., eating caloric chocolate) and
higher order goals (e.g., dieting). Self-control implies that people
try to resolve the conflict in favor of the higher order goal. In
order to achieve this, people have to avoid or distance themselves from the temptation in order to approach the desired goal.
One strategy is to increase the value of the higher goal and to
discount the value of the temptation (Fishbach, Zhang, & Trope,
2010; Trope & Fishbach, 2000). Such value change can sometimes happen out of a persons awareness and can be detected
using behavioral measures of physical distancing. To illustrate,
Fishbach and Shah (2006) asked participants to use a joystick to
pull away from or push towards the computer screen verbal stimuli representing either temptations (e.g., fatty foods) or representations of action alternatives that support long-term goal pursuit
(e.g., fitness-related terms). They argued that over time, people
develop strategies to devalue and avoid short-term temptations
to get them out of sight and far from reach, metaphorically
pushing them away. Over time, a general tendency to avoid
temptations may develop. Indeed, participants who had extensively exercised self-control (i.e., dieters) were faster in pushing
temptations away than participants who were not experts in dieting. For goal-related fitness words, dieters were faster in pulling
towards them than people who were not on a diet. Results were
replicated with successful and less successful students, showing
that better self-regulators pushed temptations to studying (e.g.,
travel) away faster than higher-order goals (e.g., degree).

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262 Emotion Review Vol. 5 No. 3

Furthermore the study found that the more subjectively attractive

the temptation was to a successful self-regulator, the faster were
movements of pushing temptations away.
Notably, it may seem that the pushing movements detailed
before may be interpreted as avoidance of undesired end-states.
More specifically, hierarchical models of self-regulation may
suggest that self-control dilemmas entail pursuit of an overarching goal for which resisting temptation is a subgoal. When the
focus is on this subgoal, an individual engaged in self-control
may avoid it. For example, a dieter may frame a delicious croissant as poison and avoid it by seeking distance. Such conceptualizations would take for granted that in the context of higher
order goals (e.g., diet), temptations (e.g., cake) are mentally
reconstructed into aversive stimuli. However, this crucial reconstruction process, changing the valence of formerly appetitive
stimuli from positive to negative, is itself the focus of our analysis. Such avoidance is the result of distancing oneself from a
temptation in service of higher order approach goals.
Note that this reconstructive process would be unnecessary if
the individual did not wish to approach the higher order goal.
Restated, activation of the higher order approach goal is the precondition for devaluing the temptation. Thus, the same act of
distancing would constitute an avoidance movement if there
were no higher order approach goal activated and people were
simply moving away from a stimulus (unless this involved overcoming obstacles; see previous lines). However, in the absence
of a self-control conflict, people typically indulge in attractive
stimuli, for instance, they will devour a croissant if there is no
conflicting dieting goal to dissuade them.
It follows then that interpreting distancing from temptations
in self-control studies as avoidance behavior ignores the appetitive context in which the actions were carried out. Specifically,
such effects have been shown for those participants who clearly
valued the higher-order goal (e.g., dieters), and accordingly
potentiated distancing occurred for those participants for whom
the goal in the conflict situation was the focal goal and who
were committed to controlling themselves (and attaining the
higher-order objective). Finally, the effects were even stronger
when the temptations were subjectively more attractive to the
highly self-regulating participants. It is thus more appropriate to
conceptualize this form of distancing as a means to approaching
desired end-states.

Conclusion
Definitions of approach and avoidance behavior usually consist
of two elements: an end-state (desired vs. undesired) and a motivational direction (moving towards vs. away from a reference
point). We believe that in most situations these two elements
overlap, such that advancing is associated with approach and
distancing with avoidance. However, in some cases, especially
when people are engaging in self-control or when they are confronted with obstacles, distancing can also be a means of
approaching a given goal. Thus, although it is insufficiently
recognized, motivational direction is not equivalent to the
motivational strategy involved when people pursue their goals.

We hasten to add that this more general point has been made
most prominently before by Higgins (1997), in the context of
his regulatory focus theory. Higgins argued that avoidance
means or strategies can support goal attainment when people
approach goals related to security (a form of desired end-state).
He suggested that on a strategic level people can approach
desired end-states by using approach (eager) or avoidance (vigilant) means. In a nutshell, this conceptualization involves a
qualitative difference between security and growth needs that
eventually evolve into a promotion focus on ideals and a
prevention focus on oughts.
Our previous examples, however, are not necessarily related
to promotion versus prevention foci. For example, in the Marguc
etal. (2012) studies, all participants approached the same goals,
whereas some experienced obstacles and others did not. Whilst
regulatory focus points to important differences on the level of
goals (promotion vs. prevention goals as desired end-states),
our examples show differences on the level of means vis--vis
desired versus undesired end-states. Simply put, distancing is
not the same as avoidance; it is rather a means to a goal that can
be either approach- or avoidance-oriented. More generally, we
suggest that only the context lends meaning to motivational
direction. Seeking a distant chair from a person may mean that
one does not like him, but it could also mean that one wishes to
see him better. Likewise, physically moving away from a chocolate cake could mean that one does not like chocolate in general, or alternatively, can mean that one in fact loves it but must
stay away from it in order to maintain self-control. In this latter
case, the activation of a higher-order focal goal changes the
meaning of distancing (recall that Fishbach and Shah [2006]
found that distancing was even more pronounced for effective
self-regulators when the temptation was high in hedonic value).
More generally, when leaving the field, seeking a distance from
the problem is avoidance; however, when using it in order to
attain the main goal, it is approach.
In sum, although our examples transcend the predictions of
regulatory focus, they are very much consistent with Higgins
general insight that the hedonic principle is not enough
(Higgins, 1997, p. 1283)in the present case, not enough to
explain why people sometimes increase their physical or mental
distance from a given reference point during states of high
approach motivation that in large part have traditionally been
associated with distance-reduction behavior.
Finally, distancing as a means to approach may not only be found
in situations of self-control or when people encounter obstacles. To
illustrate, adoration toward or the desire to be held more closely in
affection by a supreme being or powerful person may be shown by
stepping back in awe or manifested in keeping a physical distance.
Likewise, admiration towards beautiful objects of art might provoke
a movement away from them. In the domain of intimate relationships
people may also at times distance themselves from their partner in
order to find themselves, thereby also improving their relationship.
We hope that our article encourages readers to step back from the
general notion that approach decreases , and that avoidance increases
the distance so that they may gain a fuller picture of the often counterintuitive ways in which people pursue their goals.

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Frster & Friedman Detour to Arrive 263

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