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Why do people behave as they do? Although scholars across a wide array of disciplines and schools of thought have wrestled with this fundamental question from many perspectives, the lion's share of research in social psychology concerning this topic historically and contemporarily centers on a person’s conscious and reportable experiences of intention and motivation. Specifically, much of this work examines the characteristics of a person’s conscious intention to achieve various goals, and the relationship between those characteristics and the actual ways in which the person pursues those goals (eg, Bandura, 1986; Carver & Scheier, 1998; Deci & Ryan, 1985; Gollwitzer, 1990; Locke & Latham, 1990; see also Mischel, Cantor, & Feldman, 1996 for a review). In particular, this research addresses the development, content, organization, and operation of people’s conscious goals, and the influence of such goals on people’s (conscious) judgments, feelings, plans, and behaviors. Some of the research on motivation over the last two decades, however, has diverged from this tradition and can perhaps be termed Implicit Motivation in that much of it focuses on how goals operate in implicit or nonconscious ways. The scope of this area of research is broad--it does not focus exclusively on whether goals can be activated nonconsciously, for instance, but rather on the complex ways in which both consciously and nonconsciously instigated goals operate based on a variety of implicit mechanisms (eg, Aarts & Dijksterhuis, 2000; Aarts, Gollwitzer, & Hassin, 2001; Bargh, 1990; Bargh, Gollwitzer, Lee-Chai, Barndollar, & Troetschel, 2001; Chartrand & Bargh …