Beyond Approach and Avoidance: Ecological Evidence for Three Fundamentally Distinct Goals in Daily Life

Motivation science has long organized goal pursuit around binary distinctions such as approach versus avoidance and promotion versus prevention. These frameworks have proven enormously productive, but leave open a fundamental question: How do people sustain what is already good in their lives? The Ternary Goal Model proposes three qualitatively distinct goals: progress goals, which aim to close discrepancies between current and desired states; protection goals, which aim to close discrepancies between anticipated and desired states; and maintenance goals, which aim to preserve valued current states and current (lack of) discrepancies. Because maintenance unfolds over extended timeframes and is elicited by the ongoing presence of valued conditions, it is largely invisible to laboratory paradigms—making ecological momentary assessment (EMA) a methodological imperative. We conducted two preregistered EMA studies to test whether these three goal types are empirically distinguishable in daily life. Study 1 (N = 100, 14 days, 6 prompts/day) examined antecedents: As predicted, current–desired discrepancy predicted increases in progress time investment, perceived threat predicted increases in protection time investment, and satisfaction with the current state predicted increases in maintenance time investment. Finally, goal importance was a particularly strong predictor of maintenance. Study 2 (N = 96, 14 days, 6 prompts/day) examined affective consequences: maintenance and progress striving both predicted higher positive affect and lower negative affect, while protection striving predicted the reverse. These findings establish maintenance as a functionally distinct motivational orientation with its own antecedents, affective benefits, and signature stability in everyday life.