Advice from a brilliant motivation scientist
Happy New Year!
I know it’s a bit late in the month to offer that greeting, but I’m still milking the fresh start feeling I get every January 1st for all it’s worth. Naturally, this month’s newsletter is focused on the science of achieving your new year’s resolutions, which is one of my favorite topics (and a focus of much of my research). Below you’ll find (mostly) relevant listens and reads as well as an interview with brilliant motivation scientist, Ayelet Fishbach. Ayelet shares evidence-based advice on the secret sauce that can help you stick to your goals.
Recommended Listens and Reads
5 Strategies for Nailing Your New Year’s Resolutions: I wrote this guide for CNN, which includes five tips to deploy when pursuing any goal.
A Penny for Your Squats?: This New York Times article summarizes key takeaways from a paper my co-authors and I recently published testing dozens of tactics for promoting behavior change.
A Clean Slate: This is one of my favorite Choiceology episodes because it explains how new years and fresh starts (more generally) affect our decisions.
The CDC Will Send All Americans Pamphlets on Probabilistic Thinking: If you love behavioral science, this Onion article will give you a belly laugh, I promise.
Finally, here are my four favorite books that can help you stick to your New Year’s Resolutions (naturally, I’m including How to Change). Happy reading!
Q&A: Get It Done
In this Q&A from Choiceology with psychologist and University of Chicago Professor Ayelet Fishbach, we talk about Ayelet and her collaborators’ research on the importance of fun to goal pursuit.
Me: Ayelet, what do you think is the most important thing for people to focus on while they're pursuing a goal?
Ayelet: I’d say how to make the immediate experience gratifying. So how do you make it fun or challenging or interesting or tasty? Immediate experience will get you a long way.
Me: And why is that? Why wouldn't we want to focus on the long-term returns?
Ayelet: We certainly want to focus on the big picture. We set goals with the idea that we want to get somewhere that might be very far from where we are now. So, focusing on the big picture is the first ingredient. You want to know where you're going so you can get there, but then you need to go there. Importantly, along the way, we’re very sensitive to how we feel in the moment. How hard is it to get out of bed if you’re not going to do something you find gratifying? The momentary experience is extremely critical for sticking with anything you’re trying to do.
Me: Could you talk a bit about the evidence for this?
Ayelet: Let’s take New Year’s resolutions. People typically set New Year’s resolutions on January 1st and ditch them a couple of weeks later. In one study, we measured how intrinsically motivated these resolutions are. Are they fun, interesting, and immediately gratifying?
Now no one sets a New Year’s resolution because it's fun. If it was fun, you wouldn’t have to resolve to do it. So people are resolving to exercise more or eat healthier food or get in touch with people more often. But still, some of these resolutions for some people are more fun or more interesting than others. And when we followed up in March, we saw that the people who set resolutions they enjoy were able to stick with them.
Me: One of my favorite studies of what I, by the way, now call the Mary Poppins Effect, is a study you did in a school where kids were working on hard math problems, and you introduced a way to make that more fun. Could you talk about that?
Ayelet: Yes, we brought colored pencils and snacks and we played music in the classroom. Teachers' intuition was that this would distract students from studying math. But when we introduced all of these positive rewards, students attempted more math problems. They worked harder.
The same happened in a gym study we did. When people were prompted to choose a workout they enjoyed rather than what they thought would be most effective, they worked out longer.
Me: Do you think this can help explain the benefits of temptation bundling – or linking something we find to be a chore (like exercise) with something that’s fun (like binge-watching a favorite TV show)?
Ayelet: Absolutely. Temptation bundling is a great strategy to increase the immediate positive experience. We can choose to work on projects that are interesting with people we like or we [can] choose to work in our favorite coffee shop. These are ways to introduce immediate fun so that you can stick to your long-term goals.
Me: You’ve shown that we don't fully appreciate that instant gratification often drives our decisions. Can you say a little bit about that?
Ayelet: So there are two important mispredictions people make about intrinsic motivation. We mispredict how much we’ll care to be intrinsically motivated—to have fun at the moment—and we mispredict how important that is for others.
Me: Why do you think people don't understand this?
Ayelet: Well, we have a family of biases that follow this general theme where people are very much driven by the here and now, but they don't appreciate it as much as they should. I know that right now what got me out of bed is the prospect of having a phone conversation with Katy Milkman, but for my next job I might think what’s most important is that I make a lot of money and I’d be willing to compromise immediate fun, enjoyment, interest and so on.
That's human. At the present, I'm aware that I care about the present. But [I think] in the future, I'll care about the big picture more.
Me: How has your research on this changed your own behavior, if at all?
Ayelet: It definitely changed my exercise regimen. I used to love running, but then I didn't like running anymore but I thought it was important for me. Then I realized that I'm going to stick much better to something I really enjoy doing. I'm now doing yoga.
Career wise, given that I have the luxury to choose what I would like to study, I certainly choose based on what feels good, what feels challenging and interesting with very little thinking about long-term consequences.
Me: I think we can be clear that you're not saying, "Quit your job because it doesn't give you as much joy as mountain climbing." You're saying, "When you go to your job, to be as effective as you can be, make it fun, and these are ways you can do that." Right?
Ayelet: Yes. And they might not be immediately apparent because you might under-appreciate how much it's important to have fun, so you might not realize that for you listening to music actually creates more enjoyment at work.
When choosing a path to a goal, we want to think about the path that is most rewarding for us at the moment. We want to add the spoonful of sugar.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
To learn more about Ayelet’s research on the importance of intrinsic motivation, listen to the episode of Choiceology where we dig into the topic or read Ayelet’s wonderful new book Get It Done.
You may also enjoy a different Q&A I recently published with Ayelet in Scientific American about how to achieve your New Year’s Resolutions.
That’s all for this month’s newsletter. See you in February!
Katy Milkman, PhD
Professor at Wharton, Host of Choiceology, an original podcast from Charles Schwab, and Bestselling Author of How to Change