Agency and Assistance in Transactive Goal Systems

In their article, “People Who Need People (and Some Who Think They Don’t): On Compensatory Personal and Social Means of Goal Pursuit,” Milyavsky et al. (this issue) put forward an elegant model of the interconnection of personal and social means in the process of attaining important goals. The postulates and hypotheses are consistent with several strains of theory and research across a diverse set of literatures, and the integration is creative and generative. In my commentary, I discuss how the Agency-Assistance Model (AAM) would predict behavior within a close relationship or transactive goal system. I thus attempt to consider the intersection of AAM with my own research and thinking on these issues as I have characterized them (with my colleagues Eli Finkel and Michelle van Dellen) in our work on Transactive Goal Dynamics (TGD) theory.