Few important things in life come
easy. Starting in school, there are days
where assignments just don’t go well.
That concept you thought you had nailed in class has flown from your
mind by the time you sit down to do your work.
As you get older, the obstacles get more varied. You might want to buy a great new car, but
you don’t have the money. You could be
thwarted at work by someone who has a different agenda. Or perhaps the economy has made it difficult
for your business to push forward on a new venture.
Dealing with obstacles is a
crucial part of being successful in life.
And there are lots of strategies we use to help us deal with them.
Sometimes, of course, we just push
through the obstacles. That is, an
obstacle may just increase our sense of commitment to a goal. I have written before about research by
Ayelet Fishbach, Ron Friedman, and Arie Kruglanski showing that we often
associate key obstacles with the goal they block. So, seeing a tempting piece of cake may
actually help to remind you that you’re on a diet.
When you’re faced with a new
obstacle, though, this kind of automatic reminding won’t work. An interesting paper by Janina Marguc, Jens
Forster, and Gerben Van Kleef in the November, 2011 issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
demonstrates that when we hit a new obstacle, one way that we deal with it is
by thinking about the problem more globally.
To get the intuition behind this,
consider a simple experiment from this paper.
In this study, participants solved a difficult maze on a computer
screen. As they worked on the maze, the
computer tracked their eye movements.
For some participants, when they reached a particular spot in the maze,
their path was suddenly blocked by a barrier.
In response to this literal obstacle, participants suddenly searched the
entire maze for other paths, while those who experienced no obstacle continued
on their way. That is, the obstacle led
people to think about the task globally rather than focusing on the specific
part of the maze they were working on.
Of course, this result isn’t that
surprising. The surprising part is that
dealing with an obstacle tended to make people think more globally in
general. For example, other groups experienced
the obstacle in the maze and then were given other tasks in which they could
respond locally or globally. In another
study, participants were given an unrelated perceptual task. In this task, people saw large letters made
up of smaller ones like the letter S made up of smaller letter F’s in the
figure. Letters like this come from a
classic study by David Navon. People who
experienced an obstacle in the maze were faster to identify the large (more
global) letter than people who had not experienced an obstacle.
Experiencing an obstacle also
affected conceptual processing. In yet
another study, people were given the Remote Associates Test (RAT). In the RAT, you see three words that appear
unrelated, and you have to identify a fourth word that fits with all three of
those words. For example, you might see
the words CRACKER, UNION, and RABBIT. (I’ll give you the answer later.) Solving these items correctly requires
thinking more globally about the words.
People who experienced an obstacle were better at solving items in the
RAT than people who had not experienced an obstacle.
This conceptual study also allowed
the authors to demonstrate an important quality of this increase in thinking
globally following an obstacle. There is
a difference between people in how likely they are to remain engaged with
difficult tasks. This difference is
called volatility. People who are not that volatile tend to
engage with a task and stick with it even when it gets difficult. Those people who are highly volatile tend to
skip from task to task to task. The
influence of an obstacle on a later task was observed only for people low in
volatility. Those people who are high in
volatility were not more likely to think more globally in general following an
obstacle.
What does this mean for you?
Your motivation system wants to
help you achieve your goals. One way it
does this is to naturally change the way you are thinking about a problem when
you reach an obstacle.
You can help it along,
though. When you reach an obstacle and
you’re feeling stuck you can help yourself to think more globally and
abstractly. A simple way to do that is
to look around the room. Check out all
of the objects in front of you. For
example, I have a coffee mug, a stuffed Squirt (from finding Nemo) and a
stapler on my desk. Looking at each
object, think about the more general category it comes from (container, toy,
and office supply in my case). Do that
for a number of objects, and you will prompt yourself to think more
abstractly. After that, go back to the
task where you reached an obstacle and see if that helps.
By the way, the correct answer to
the RAT item from earlier was JACK.
