Emerging conventional wisdom has it that adviser-client relationships benefit from using more intuitive, goals-based language, and from framing portfolio performance and risk relative to achieving client goals. However, a growing body of research into how people respond to different types of goals (e.g. specific versus nonspecific goals) and how people think about goal success versus failure suggests that there are many nuances.

In the seminal 1999 paper presented below, Heath et al explore the relationship between goals and the S-shaped value function as ...