Moving on up: The goal of advancement

We have lots of goals in life.  Many of them involve some kind of advancement.  If you are in school, you set the goal to advance to the next grade or to the next level of your degree.  At work, you might aspire to a promotion or to a job with more responsibility.  When learning to play a musical instrument, you might dream of learning a more difficult piece of music or to play in a band.   Even video games often have a series of levels that you traverse to move through the game. These situations involve what are called hierarchical goals, because you have to move up the ladder to advance to the next goal.

What makes you want to step up to the next level?

This question was addressed in a paper by Minjung Koo and Ayelet Fishbach in a July, 2010 paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.  These authors pointed out that there are two ways to think about your current level within a goal hierarchy.  You could spend your time thinking about what you have accomplished so far in your current position.  Alternatively, you could focus on the tasks that you have left to accomplish in that position. 

The general finding of the five studies in this paper is that you are more satisfied with your current position if you focus on the tasks you have accomplished than if you think about what you have left to achieve.  However, you are more interested and energized to advance to the next level if you focus your thoughts on what you have left to achieve than if you think about what you have accomplished.  The authors demonstrated this point both with experiments in which they created hierarchies of goals within tasks they created in the lab (such as reviewing snippets of music) as well as in studies in which people thought about their current jobs and prospects for advances.

At some level, these findings fit with intuitions about goals.  If you think about the future and the tasks that lie ahead of you, it makes sense that would also give you energy to move on to the level.  If you think about the past, then it also seems reasonable that would make you more satisfied with what you have already achieved, and should be less motivating for advancement.

To me, the interesting aspect of these findings is the relationship between satisfaction and motivation.  The results suggest that people are most motivated to advance to a new level of the goal hierarchy when they are least satisfied with their current position.  This finding suggests why it is so difficult both to enjoy the journey in life and also to achieve your broader aims.  When you are happy with what you have achieved, you are just not as interested in moving forward.  Our motivational system requires some dissatisfaction to help us to provide the energy to advance.

These experimental results also suggest a way out of this bind.  It is possible to shift your focus between what you have accomplished and what lies ahead of you.  When you are focused on your accomplishments, you can feel good about the journey, at least temporarily.  When you are focused on what is left to achieve, you can feel energized to move into the future.  By shifting your focus at different times, you provide yourself with the chance to have some contentment with your life’s journey and still have the energy to achieve bigger things.

Overconfidence and effort: Go boldly where no one has ever gone before

There is a lot of evidence that people are overconfident in many judgments about themselves.  If you ask a group of people how talented they are at some skill relative to the population as a whole (or even relative to a specific group that they are a part of), the average response is above average.  This finding has sometimes been called the “Lake Wobegon” effect after the town in Garrison Keillor’s Prairie Home Companion where “all of the children are above average.”  Of course, everyone can’t really be above average, and so some people are overly optimistic about  their abilities.

What value does this optimism have?

A paper in the February, 2010 issue of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General by Ying Zhang and Ayelet Fishbach suggests that being optimistic about your ability to perform some task may enhance your overall performance.  However, this optimism is most useful when the task you expect the task you are about to perform is going to be difficult.

In one study, people were told that they were going to have to solve anagrams in which they had to rearrange the letters of a word to form other words.  For example, the word “items” can be rearranged to form the words “times,” “mites,” and “emits.”  They were led to believe that this task was going to be easy or difficult to do.

Before starting to solve the anagrams, half the people were asked to rate how well they would do on the task relative to everyone else doing it (knowing that the other participants would also be university students).  Of interest, when people thought they were going to get a hard task, they felt that they would do better than 66% of the other participants, but when they thought they were going to get an easy task, they felt they would do better than only 54% of the participants.  The other half of the people in the study did not rate how well they would do in the task relative to others.

The experimenters then measured how long people spent solving the anagrams.  People who did not rate how well they would do compared to others spent about the same amount of time on the task whether they were led to believe that it was going to be easy or hard (with a slight tendency for those who thought it was going to be easy to spend more time than those who thought it was going to be hard.

Those people who rated how well they would do on the task showed a much different pattern.  Those people who thought the task was going to be hard spent much more time on the task overall than those who thought the task would be easy.  The optimism of the people who thought the task would be hard translated into effort on the task.

It isn’t that people are incapable of making accurate assessments of their performance.   In another study, people made their judgments about how well they were going to do on the task under one of two different conditions.  One group was told that their reward for doing the task would be based on their overall performance.  A second group was told that their reward for doing the task would be based on whether their judgment of how well they would do relative to others was accurate.

The people who were rewarded for the accuracy of their judgment judged that they would be more likely to do well in the easy task than in the hard task, and they ended up spending more time at the easy task than the hard one.  Those who were rewarded for their performance on the task, though, judged that they would do better on the hard task than the easy task.  These people spent more time on the hard task than the easy one as well. 

These results suggest that it can be valuable to be overly optimistic about your performance.  In particular, when you are about to go where no one has ever gone before, you are better off going boldly where no one has ever gone before.  The optimism in the face of difficult tasks will help you to put more effort into performing well.