7.5.4 Identifying Causal Relationships
Integration, if it is to be useful, must lead to the establishment of laws or general principles. Identifying generalizable principles requires identifying causal relationships. Induction is more than enumeration (counting). It is more than meta-analysis, which is enumeration that includes mean effect sizes. When using enumeration alone, there is no answer to the skeptics’ query: ‘‘How do you know that the relationship will come out the next time?’’ This was an issue we did not fully understand when developing goal theory. We thought that the more types of tasks, subjects, settings, performance measures used, etc., the better—that is, the more confidence one could have in the theory. Although variation in conditions is beneficial (e.g., to discover moderators), we did not see that identifying causal relationships (which we subsequently did identify) was the fundamental issue. For example, we can have confidence that goals work when we know the means by which they work (mediators) and the relevant context factors (moderators). Similarly, by understanding that emotions were implicit value judgments (Locke, 1976; Locke and Latham, 1990) and that a goal is a specific type of value, we now understand why goal success causes satisfaction.