| Sumario: | The setting of difficult goals consistently has been found to improve performance in both laboratory and field settings. However, the setting of difficult goals has sometimes been confounded with the difficulty of the task. This especially is true in field studies where the difficulty of goals and more complex tasks often co-vary. The present study was designed to investigate the relative contribution of goal setting and task difficulty to performance on chess problems. Employing a 3 × 3 factorial design, 82 chess-playing undergraduates attempted to solve either easy, moderately difficult, or difficult chess problems, after accepting either an easy, moderately difficult, or difficult goal. The results showed that both goals and task difficulty contributed additively to task performance.
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