Ulterior Motives  How goals, both seen and unseen, drive
behavior  I Want What Is Best for You, But What Is Easy for Me
We make different selections for other people than for
ourselves.  At the end of a long week, we often order takeout
food from a local restaurant rather than cooking.  There are a
lot of restaurants in Austin, and many of them serve really
excellent food.  Yet, we tend to order from the same small list
of places.  There are better restaurants, but by the time we get
down to ordering, we are most interested in doing what is
easiest.  The places we normally pick are within a few minutes’
drive of the house.   This example rests on two factors that
influence a lot of our choices:  desirability and feasibility. 
Desirability is how much we want a particular option. 
Feasibility reflects how easy it is to get that option or how
likely we are to succeed if we make a particular choice.  An
interesting paper by Jingyi Lu, Xiaofei Xie, and Jingzhe Xu in
the February, 2013 issue of Personality and So