Deciding Versus Doing: What the Rubicon Model of Action Phases Says About Stalled Goals

Peter Gollwitzer’s research group found that the way you think about a goal changes depending on whether you are deciding on it or planning it. In experiments from the late 1980s, people who had just weighed the pros and cons of a personal decision judged their control over a task more accurately. People who had just planned how to carry out a goal were more optimistic about their control, including when they had none. Both states are useful. They are also easy to be in at the wrong time.

What are the four phases of the Rubicon model?

Heckhausen and Gollwitzer (1987, Motivation and Emotion) proposed that a course of action splits into four consecutive phases, each with its own task. Gollwitzer’s later retrospective in Psychological Inquiry (2003) lays them out like this: in the predecision phase you choose among wishes by weighing desirability and feasibility; in the preaction phase you get started, which for anything non-routine means deciding when, where and how; in the action phase you push the started action to completion; in the postaction phase you judge whether the goal was reached or more striving is needed.

The “Rubicon” is the line between the first and second phases. Before it, you are choosing. After it, you are committed.

Phase	Question you are answering	Mindset	What helps
Predecision	Do I want this, and can I get it?	Deliberative: open-minded, weighs pros and cons, realistic about control	Collect disconfirming evidence, name what would make you say no, set a date to decide
Preaction	When, where and how do I start?	Implemental: closed-minded, focused on execution, optimistic	Stop comparing alternatives; write the first steps with times and places
Action	Am I still moving toward it?	Persistence	Track progress; keep the plan simple enough to survive a bad day
Postaction	Did it work, and what now?	Evaluative again	Compare the result with the standard you set, then continue, change or stop on purpose

What did the experiments find?

The model began with a surprise. Heckhausen and Gollwitzer (1987) expected people mid-deliberation to be mentally loaded and to do worse on a short-term noun-span test than people mid-planning. Gollwitzer’s 2003 account says the opposite happened: deliberators’ span grew compared with both their own earlier span and the planners’. He reads this as open-mindedness, a receptiveness to all kinds of information that suits someone who does not yet know which way the decision will go. He also concedes the explanation was post hoc, which is why the group then tested predictions in new studies.

Two experiments by Gollwitzer and Kinney (1989, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology) used a contingency-learning task in which a button press had no real effect on a light. In the first, people who were choosing between two apparatuses judged their control accurately whether the light came on often or rarely. People who had committed to a plan showed an illusion of control when the light came on often. In the second, a deliberative group named an unresolved personal problem and reasoned through the consequences, a planning group listed five steps for a three-month project, and a control group did neither. Deliberators gave the lowest, most accurate control ratings. Planners gave the highest, above the controls.

Taylor and Gollwitzer (1995) extended this to everyday risks such as accidents and addiction. Everyone rated themselves as less vulnerable than the average college student, but deliberators did so less than planners, and the result held for both controllable and uncontrollable risks, according to Gollwitzer’s 2003 summary. Mood did not explain it.

Fujita, Gollwitzer and Oettingen (2007, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology) added that people in a deliberative mindset showed better recognition of irrelevant words that flashed by while they worked on something else. That is the open-minded versus closed-minded contrast measured a third way. I read only the abstract of that paper, so I am not reporting its sample sizes.

How do the phases go wrong?

Two failure patterns follow from the research, and one of them has direct evidence.

Deliberating after you have decided. Gagné and Lydon (2001), summarized by Gollwitzer, asked people to deliberate a relationship goal they were already pursuing. Their partner ratings came out higher than those of people who were planning the relationship goal. The authors’ reading was defensiveness: reopening the question felt threatening, so people boosted their view of the answer they had. If that holds outside the lab, late-stage second-guessing gives you more rationalization, not more information.

Planning before you have decided. This one is my inference from the findings, not a tested result. If planning makes control feel higher than it is, a detailed schedule for a goal you have not honestly evaluated will feel more feasible than the evidence says. The planning fallacy is a close cousin, and the question of whether to quit something you are already invested in is a postaction one, as in this keep-or-quit audit.

How can you tell which phase you are in?

Three checks follow. None is a validated diagnostic; they are practical readings of the model.

1. Can you state the decision in one sentence with a yes or no? If the sentence still contains “or”, you are in the predecision phase.
2. Is your next action a comparison or a start? Reading reviews, asking a fourth person, or rebuilding the pros-and-cons list is deliberation. Booking the slot or buying the shoes is preaction.
3. Does a flaw in the plan make you want to reconsider the goal, or fix the plan? After the Rubicon, the useful reaction is to fix the plan. Gollwitzer describes persistence under the implemental mindset as adaptive: Brandstätter and Frank (2002) found those participants gave up faster when a task was truly impossible.

If you are in the first phase, deliberate on purpose and with a deadline, and look for reasons the goal might be wrong or out of reach. If you are in the second, quit comparing and settle when, where and how you will start. Implementation intentions are the tool built for that phase, and only that phase.

For waking up, the same split applies. “Should I really move my alarm to 6:00?” is a question for an evening with a notebook. “It is 6:00 and the alarm is going” is not a time to reopen it. After the decision, goal shielding research suggests commitment itself pushes rival goals out of mind, which helps execution.

What this does not show

Almost all of this evidence comes from Gollwitzer’s own group and collaborators, using induced mindsets in short lab tasks with mostly student samples. I did not find an independent replication in the sources I read, so treat the effect sizes as unknown. The original noun-span result was unexpected, and the open-mindedness explanation came afterward.

Real goals mix phases. You can be deliberating one part of a project while implementing another. And the benefit of the implemental mindset for starting a task was found only when people faced a conflict between options (Pösl, 1994; Brandstätter and Frank, 2002, both via Gollwitzer 2003). Without conflict, there was no difference between the mindsets.

The practical claim is modest: decisions benefit from doubt, and execution benefits from its absence. Mixing them up costs you either way.