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.

Get energized about your future…just compare it to your life now

It is easier to set goals than to achieve them.  Setting goals requires only thinking about the future, and envisioning what you would like that future to be.  If you want to learn to sing, you can imagine yourself as a successful singer and how rewarding it would be to sing for a group of people who are enjoying your music.  If you want to become a better student, you can think about studying or passing tests or getting a good report card.  Actually satisfying your goals, though, requires effort.  It requires the energy to move forward and actually carry out a plan to achieve the goal.

Where can that energy come from? 

Research by Gabriele Oettingen and her colleagues suggests that there are two key factors that help you get the energy you need to satisfy your goals.  First, your goals need to be realistic, and second, you need to compare the future you desire to your situation right now.  Let me discuss each of these in turn.

The first point seems obvious at some level, but it is really important.  You need to set goals that are realistic.  Your motivational system is actually pretty smart.  If you set a goal that you really cannot achieve, then no matter what you do, you will have difficulty getting the energy to work on it.  Instead, you will have feelings of low energy and frustration.  So, if you are having difficulty getting energized to satisfy a goal, you should spend some time thinking about whether your goal is realistic.

The second important thing to do is to compare your desired future to your present world.  This process has been an important thrust of Oettingen’s research.  The key is to find the differences between what you hope for your future and what is true now, and to assess the obstacles that stand in your way of turning the present into the future.  Thinking carefully about these obstacles allows you to find ways to overcome them. 

Just thinking about the future does not work the same way.  In Oettingen’s experiments, people who contrast the future with the present are much more likely to achieve their goals later than those people who just indulge themselves in thoughts about how nice the future would be if the goal were satisfied.

New research suggests that an important reason why people satisfy their goals successfully when they contrast the future to the present is that this process gives them motivational energy to pursue their goals.  For example, in a paper by Oettingen with Doris Mayer, Timur Sevincer, Elizabeth Stephens, Hyeon-ju Pak, and Meike Hagenah in the May, 2009 issue of Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, people were asked to either compare their future to the present when thinking about making a change in a friendship or to just think about a positive future outcome.  Consistent with past research, people who were contrasting the future to the present were more likely to commit to this change in a personal relationship than people who just thought about the future.

At the same time, people’s blood pressure was being examined.  Systolic blood pressure is a reasonable measure of how energized or aroused someone has become.  People showed a bigger change in blood pressure when they were contrasting the desired future to the present than when they were just thinking about the desired future.  This change in blood pressure was highly correlated with people’s statements about how committed they were to actually satisfy this goal.

In later studies, they found that people got energized when they were thinking about goals that were realistic to achieve, but not when they were thinking about goals that are unrealistic to achieve.

So, if you want to achieve your goals, you need motivational energy.  Happily, this motivational energy is easy to come by.  All you need to do is to keep your goals realistic, and then think carefully about the difference between your present reality and your desired future.  When you think about the obstacles that prevent you from satisfying your goals, your motivational system will naturally give you the energy to get started on the road to overcoming the things that stand in the way of what you want.

Dream Global, Act Local

When you want to motivate someone to do something, you tell them to Dream Big, and to Reach for the Stars.  That is, of course, important advice.  It is hard to achieve greatness without ever dreaming of greatness.  An important question, though, is how you should go about achieving that greatness after you have dreamed it?

An interesting study in the November, 2008 issue of Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin by Linda Houser-Marko and Kennon Sheldon sheds some light on that question.  They point out that there is lots of previous research (much of it by Dan Wegner and Robin Vallacher) that points out that people are able to identify the actions they are carrying out at a variety of different levels of generality. For example, imagine that you are talking on the phone in order to ask your friend whether you can borrow her car.  If someone stopped you in the middle of the conversation and asked you what you were doing, you could say “begging for a car,” or perhaps “asking a question” or even “speaking into the phone.”  The first of these is a very general statement of what you are doing.  The last of these is a very specific action that is part of the more general action of begging for a car. 

When you dream big, you are usually thinking about a grand and general action.  You might want to become a great musician, get a good grade in a class, or perhaps get a rewarding job, or even make the world a safer place.  To carry out any of these big goals, you also need to carry out a series of smaller steps.  For example, getting an A in a class might require studying a certain number of hours each week, or practicing skills from the class, or spending an amount of time writing.

When you are in the process of trying to achieve a big goal, how should you think about your actions?

Houser-Marko and Sheldon’s data suggest that you should focus on the specific actions that are part of the broader goal.  The reason why you should focus on actions, is that you may sometimes fail along the way toward trying to achieve the broader goal.  For example, if you want to get an A in the class, you might set the goal of studying at least 10 hours a week for the class.  Imagine you have a difficult week, or perhaps a strong temptation comes up.  You might study only 6 hours for the class in one week.  If you focus on the general goal of getting an A, then you will feel worse about this failure than if you focus just on the local goal of studying for 10 hours.  The idea is that small failures along the way are more likely to be seen as chipping away at the possibility that you will achieve the broader goal when you focus only on that general goal than if you focus on the specific actions.  If you start to feel bad about your prospects for success at the larger goal, you may give up altogether. 

So, these findings suggest that when you dream, you should dream globally.  Set your sights on high achievement.  But when it comes time to actually achieve your goal, act locally.  Find specific actions that will bring you toward your goal. Even if you stumble on the way to the goal, if you focus on the specific actions, you will not see your failure as a sign that you will not succeed at your dreams.