Can this tactic help you stick to your resolutions?
Wharton Marketing professor Marissa Sharif explains the power of setting tough goals with “emergency reserves” to keep you on track.
First and foremost, happy New Year! As long-time subscribers will know, I’m extra busy in January because nearly every media outlet runs a story on why we set New Year’s resolutions and how you can achieve yours, which happens to dovetail with my area of expertise. So, naturally, I have more listens and reads to recommend than usual (all New Year’s themed). I’ve also picked a topic for this month’s Q&A that I hope will give you a leg up on achieving your New Year’s resolutions, and it lets me shine a light on one of my most creative Wharton colleagues.
Finally, my biggest January news is that LitVideobooks has turned my book, How to Change, into a 60-minute documentary. Here’s a preview to whet your appetite:
If you’d like to see the whole thing, please use the promo code STREAMHTC to get 60% off.
I’m a big fan of the great documentaries the LitVideobooks team creates about bestselling business titles, and I hope you’ll check out not only the How to Change videobook but also videobooks by some of my favorite behavioral scientists featured in past newsletters (like Bob Cialdini’s Influence and Annie Duke’s Thinking in Bets).
This Month’s Recommended Listens and Reads on New Year’s Resolutions
How Long Does it Take to Form a Habit?: In this CNN op-ed, my co-authors and I share key takeaways from our analyses of data on tens of thousands of people’s gym-going and handwashing patterns.
“The Grandaddy of All Fresh Starts”: Yes, that’s what I called New Year’s in this interview with CNBC, and I stand by it, as well as all the science I shared to help you achieve your goals.
Do New Year’s Resolutions Always Fail?: The Washington Post set out to answer this question, and I helped them (spoiler alert: the answer is no!).
You can also find my advice on how to nail your New Year’s resolutions this season in The New York Times, National Geographic, Forbes, Reuters, Fortune, The Daily Mail, and on NPR and Offline with Jon Favreau. Or, of course, you can check out my book How to Change or one of my other favorite science books about goal achievement (pictured below).
Q&A: Emergency Reserves
In this Q&A from Choiceology, my Wharton colleague, marketing professor Marissa Sharif, discusses her extensive research on a goal-setting trick that can help you achieve more success sticking to daily or weekly goals in 2024.
Me: Marissa, can you define an emergency reserve? What is it exactly?
Marissa: Sure. A goal with an emergency reserve is a goal that has a difficult reference point, but it also has some slack or flexibility. So, imagine for example, a goal of going to the gym seven days of the week with two emergency skip days, or think about a budget that has maybe $50 set aside for emergencies per week or per month.
Me: Could you describe some of your research showing that emergency reserves can help people achieve more?
Marissa: We've done lots of studies on this. My favorite study has been in the context of encouraging people to track their steps and to reach an individualized step goal. We randomly assigned people to a few different conditions. We had a hard goal, which was to reach your step goal seven days a week. Let's say it's 10,000 steps. We had an easy goal, which in this case was to reach your step goal five days of the week. And then we had an emergency reserve goal, which was to reach your step goal seven days of the week, but you got two emergency skip days. And what we found is that people with these emergency reserve goals ended up taking more steps and reaching their step goal more often than both people with the easy (5 day per week) goal and the hard (7 day per week) goal.
Me: I really love that study. Could you talk a little bit about why emergency reserves help people achieve more?
Marissa: There are two reasons, and the easy and hard goals both help us understand why emergency reserves are motivating. So, the first reason is that there’s resistance to using the emergency reserves. For example, say your goal is to walk 10,000 steps seven days per week with two emergency skip days. What happens is that people strive to reach that difficult, seven day reference point. They try to reach their step goal every single day. And so prior research has shown that there are benefits to having these challenging goals — they lead people to really strive. You might be thinking, "Okay, they have this slack. Why wouldn't they just use that? Why are they trying to reach their goal every day?"
And what we suggest is that people are holding onto those emergency reserves. They're waiting for a true emergency situation where they might need to use those. And so, they're aiming for that difficult reference point, waiting for those situations to occur. In some cases, they do occur, and they do need to use their emergency reserves, but in many situations, they don't occur, and people don't end up using them. So that's the first part. Having this difficult reference point and trying to resist using those reserves helps people try hard.
The second part is that having emergency reserves helps people persist in the face of a failure. So hard goals are this double-edged sword in that they encourage people to try really hard, but also because they're hard, it's likely that people will have missteps. Life happens. That's just inevitable when we're pursuing these goals over time. And when people experience these missteps, a lot of the time they end up giving up. They feel like their goal isn’t attainable anymore. So again, thinking about that harder goal, a goal that has you trying to, say, walk 10,000 steps seven days of the week — with those kinds of goals if you end up missing one day people will think: "What's the point of me continuing? I won't be able to reach the seven-day goal," and they just abandon it, and they don't try to reach their step goal anymore.
The emergency reserve is this built-in system so people can fail without really feeling like they violated their goal. They feel like it's still in sight. They can still make it. The goal's still attainable, and it helps them persist ever after those missteps.
Me: So, if I were to try to summarize, I would say emergency reserves with tough goals stretch you. Then because we're hoarders by nature, you hoard the emergency reserves and don't use them. And finally, if you do have a misstep, you have a get out of jail free card in the form of an emergency reserve, so you don't give up on yourself.
Marissa: Exactly. That's great.
Me: I love that. What's the difference between an emergency reserve and just taking a mulligan or a do-over?
Marissa: It's similar, but we found that the label and the framing are both important. People try to use resources in the way that they're labeled, and so labeling it mentally as an emergency reserve or thinking of it as, "I want to use this only in cases that I really need to," helps with that resistance component; it helps with people not completely taking advantage of it.
Me: Got it. That’s very helpful. Is it ever a bad idea to give yourself emergency reserves? Can people give themselves too many?
Marissa: Yeah. I think less is better than more. Erring on the side of fewer emergency reserves leads them to feel more like limited resources, and people are less likely to use them.
Me: Basically, we just want to get people to hoard those get-out-of-jail-free cards.
Marissa: Yes
Me: Thank you, Marissa. This has been really illuminating.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
To learn more about Marissa’s work on using emergency reserves to achieve your goals, listen to the episode of Choiceology where we dig into the topic.
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
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