Ever a sucker for Buzzfeed-type stuff, I couldn’t resist clicking on 14 Amazing Psychology Facts You Should Keep to Yourself! ( http://www.idealistrevolution.org/14-psychology-facts/). I was immediately riveted by the first one:
1. If you announce your goals to others, you are less likely...
Ever a sucker for Buzzfeed-type stuff, I couldn’t resist clicking on 14 Amazing Psychology Facts You Should Keep to Yourself! ( http://www.idealistrevolution.org/14-psychology-facts/). I was immediately riveted by the first one:
1. If you announce your goals to others, you are less likely to make them happen because you lose motivation, studies confirmed. There have been tests since as early as 1933 that prove that once intended goals are announced, people are less likely to follow through with them as they lose motivation. This is thought to happen because doing so satisfies a person’s self-identity just enough to prevent them performing the hard work to achieve those goals.
I thought about this. It didn’t seem to hold true with me – announcing my goals embarrasses me into achieving them.
For example, having told everybody in my Catholic
boarding school I was going to steal the school bell before I left – that
Pavlovian bell which for four years had obliged me to go to the chapel, caused
me to salivate for breakfast, lunch and supper, harried me at a trot to
classes, and finally, night after endless night, had sent me to bed – I simply
had to spend my last night at school stealing it.
After fortifying our courage
at a nearby pub, my accomplice Ed and I lifted some tools from the lightly
locked car club shed and grabbed a bunch of sheets from the laundry. I climbed
unsteadily onto the central hinge of a vertically-opening dormitory window,
throwing the sheets ahead of me, swinging out on the gutter and up onto the
pitched roof two stories up. I crept along to where the bell hung, its pull dangling
into the Headmaster’s bedroom. Wrapping a sheet around the clapper and oiling
my tools for silence, I sawed patiently, quietly, at the joists for close to an
hour. Eventually, the thing dropped onto my waiting arms. I turned and slid
down the slope of the roof to the gutter with the 50-pound monster cradled in
my lap.
It was a moment for reflection: there I sat, at four in the morning on
my last day at school, with my legs over the edge of the roof and Ed a small dot
with waving arms in the courtyard two stories below. Slowly, I lowered the silenced
bell on sheets tied together. Ed received it and tiptoed off to hide it in my
trunk, which was due to follow me home. Meanwhile, I tiptoed back up to the
rooftree, skulked along the intersecting roofs to my dormitory, and did an
exultant Tarzan on the gutter, swinging through the open window and landing like
a cat on the linoleum among 23 sleeping, groaning, farting schoolboys.
I was expelled the next morning when the headmaster woke and yanked on the bell pull, bringing down the truncated harness in his study. His clue as to who had done the deed? A year of my announcements of my goal.
But I digress. Having told people I was going to drive from Delhi to Kathmandu (announcing it on the office billboard, no less) made me do the drive. Telling people I was going to drive from Harare to Brazzaville also made me do that drive, Telling people I was going to write a book has made me write that book. And so on. I most certainly motivate myself by the threat of embarrassment. Fear of being called a fraud makes me absolutely genuine.
Of course, this means you have to be careful about which of your brain sizzlers you choose to announce publically. The ones about intending to look cool, handsome, intelligent, the ones about the girl you intend to bed or wed, or your certainty to win the lottery – those require a bit of circumspection and privacy.
That is what is wrong with this generalization. You should certainly shut up about some of your plans, but not necessarily all of them, as this maxim suggests.
With these doubts in mind, I decided to test the evidence. Here is what a TED speaker (the music entrepreneur Derek Sivers) offered (http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/10/28/are-public-commitments-counterproductive/): “1926, Kurt Lewin, founder of social psychology, called this “substitution”. 1933, Vera Mahler found, when it was acknowledged by others, it felt real in the mind. 1982, Peter Gollwitzer wrote a whole book about this and in 2009, he did some new tests that were published. [The tests involved] 163 people…”
Hmm. You’ve got to start wondering about the evidence when people cite vague pronouncements from 1926 and 1933 as a lead up to this Gollwitzer, who wrote a book about it in 1982 and then seems to have waited 27 years to do “some new tests”. Who was he and what was he doing in between? The odour of rat was becoming evident. What were these tests? Were we being sold an opinion on the basis of 163 white American college students?
So I took another look. Turns out Lewin was not talking about bragging your goals, particularly, but putting forward a rather boring theory of substitution. Vera Mahler may have felt real in the mind, but again wasn’t only and specifically talking about making your goals known.
And Professor Gollwitzer? Well, suffice it to say that the work of this impeccably qualified academic psychologist (a Professor of Social-Personality Psychology at New York University since 1999). has surely been simplified into gibberish by later explicators. His web page lists 93 learned publications since 2009 and a further 54 selected from his output since 1981.
I sat back and with mounting concern applied myself to a thorough reading – of their titles. The “whole book” he published in 1982 must have been the expansion of his PhD thesis. Breezing forward past hundreds of publications, I wanted to examine the experiment with the 163 students. I found the article.
Mercifully Ian Ayres ( Yale Law School ’86) has spared me reading that as well. His commentary was originally posted on newyorktimes.com on 28 October 2010, and is available as Are Public Commitments Counterproductive? at http://www.law.yale.edu/news/12396.htm). Really, Ayres does a very thorough job of debunking this ”amazing psychological fact”. His key conclusions about the experiment (which seems to have involved 32 students, not 163) are:
“…the Gollwitzer study is not well-designed to support Sivers’s claim that we shouldn’t tell our friends our goal so that they hold us to it. In the Gollwitzer experiment, there was no “telling,” there were “no friends” and there was no subsequent “holding us to it.” For goal-telling to be effective, it is crucial that your friends subsequently learn whether or not you succeeded. It is the potential embarrassment of not following through combined with the potential pride in reaching your goal that provides the key ingredient.”
Exactly! And he cites an example of someone competing a marathon using the self-embarrassment technique I am advocating here.
“The Gollwitzer experiments might suggest that telling people about goals may not be productive if the audience is never going to find out whether you succeed…The mere possibility that they will notice that you are not following through on your commitment is sufficient to add the extra layer of accountability.”
OK, debunking completed: you can go back to announcing those of your goals where the audience is likely to be able to see if you succeed or not. As for the others: shut up.
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