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.

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.

If you’re not in a group, you better have a plan.

Much of your life is spent doing routine things.  On weekdays, you have a set of actions you take out of habit to wake up, get ready to leave your house, go to work or school and so on through the day.  You also have some strategies for helping you to remember things that vary from day to day.  You may have a to-do list or an agenda.  You might place little post-it notes around your home or office to remind you to do things.

But how do you make sure that you do things that are really rare?  By definition, you have no routines for those.

A study by David Nickerson and Todd Rogers in the February, 2010 issue of Psychological Science examined this question by looking at voting behavior.

There is research by Peter Gollwitzer and his colleagues that it can often be helpful to envision a specific plan (which he calls an implementation intention) when you need to perform an action that is out of the ordinary.  Voting can be a pain, for example.  If election day is during the week (as it often is), you have to arrange your day to get to a polling station at a time when you can afford to wait if there is a line.  That requires thinking carefully about your schedule for that day and choosing a time of day that makes sense to go. 

Do these plans actually help you?

Nickerson and Rogers built a study into calls made to nearly 300,000 voters in the Democratic Presidential Primary election in Pennsylvania 2008.  They selected only registered voters who rarely vote in the primary elections.  Some voters were just called and reminded to vote.  A standard “Get out the vote” call.  Some were called and asked to predict whether they thought they would vote in the upcoming primary.  A third group was asked to think specifically about how they would get to the polls on election day in order to vote.  That is, they had to form an implementation intention.  Later, the voting records were checked to determine the proportion of people receiving each type of call who actually voted.

The results were interesting.

People who lived in a family with 2 or more registered voters in the house were completely unaffected by the type of call they received.  They were just as likely to vote whether they got a call or not and the type of call they received did not matter.

The results were quite different for people who were the only registered voter in their home.  These people were much more likely to vote if they were asked to form a specific plan than if they were just reminded to vote or asked to predict whether they would vote. 

What does this mean?  Obviously, performing actions that go beyond the ordinary is difficult.  In this primary election, only about 45% of registered Democrats actually voted, so most people either were not interested or could not find a way to get to the polls. 

If you live with a group, then it is easier for everyone in the group to talk about their plans.  It is also easier get support from others to help you satisfy your goals.  For example, all of you might go to the polls together.

When you are the only one responsible for an action, though, you don’t have other people to discuss your plans with.  You also don’t have social support for carrying out an action.  So, being forced to think through the details of a plan is particularly important when you are acting alone.

There are two important conclusions to draw from this research.

First, if you know you are going to have to do something out of the ordinary (like voting or perhaps starting a new exercise program), you should try to enlist a few others to help you out.  It is easier to generate intentions and stick to them when you are in a group.

Second, if you can’t enlist a group, then make sure you really think through the details of a plan to carry out an action.  That detailed plan will help you to overcome the variety of obstacles that often keep you from succeeding when you have to go beyond the ordinary actions of the day.