A goal is the mind’s favorite solution to the body’s problems. Goals are one of the most potent, almost incantatory, mental objects we can create.
In the Silivalley party running up to “Y2K,” I was a Stanford grad student, Left Behind, who watched as many classmates got raptured into booming startups. In the summer of ’97, a great experimentalist, Al Bandura, held a popup seminar to discuss his newly published Self Efficacy: The Exercise of Control. Self-Efficacy might be boiled down to the slogan: “Self-confidence counts (but it's hard to sustain).” Mental representations impact our abilities and accomplishments. It matters what we think we are doing: Are we practicing or learning, are we performing or being judged?
Bandura’s 4th chapter definitively persuaded me of how powerful goals can be. As a stylized fact, it's generally true that setting goals accomplishes significantly more, in almost any context, than would be accomplished if you just do your best.
I had a chance to pose two questions to all 20 doctoral students in attendance.
1- Do you believe setting a goal reliably delivers a boost to (practically) anything you’d like to improve in your life?
Twenty out of 20 were convinced, including me. So far, so common-sensible.
The rub came with my follow-on question:
2- Did you set a new goal in any area of your life after reading the chapter?
Nineteen out of 20 (95%) said “No.”
I was surprised that almost no one’s behavior changes, even after they’ve absorbed exhaustive info on how to change their behavior via goal-setting. (I was decidedly NOT the exception here.)
Pretty much since that seminar, I’ve been trying to understand what causes this breakdown between what I know and what I do. I take as a given: If you CAN get a person to set a behavioral goal, that will help them realize their articulated desire.
I discovered that people seem to actively avoid setting goals in areas of greatest importance to their life.
My PhD explored this breakdown between knowledge and action. I discovered that people seem to actively avoid setting goals in areas of greatest importance to their life. Across multiple studies, I asked (Stanford undergrads) to write down their goals in different areas of life. Family, friends, money, academics, spirituality are the kinds of areas that they ranked in terms of personal import. Surprisingly, when a person rated a domain as important, they were less capable of articulating their goals, compared to another student who rated that same domain as less important. After seeing this gap across repeated studies, I labeled this the “Delmore Effect.” It still feels paradoxical that we so frequently avoid setting an explicit goal for the things we most hope to accomplish.
Like Delmore Schwartz, I came to feel that our neglect is motivated by our avoiding the threat implicit in every goal: When we speak aloud that we aim to hit a specific mark, we simultaneously define how to judge if we have failed.
The emotional risk is greatest when we truly covet something. Robert Caro’s 4th volume of LBJ recounts how Johnson obsessively longed to become president. "As much as Johnson wanted the nomination, he did not want to be tarred with ... having lost it." His closest ally described LBJ's inability to openly announce his bid as a case of "If he didn't try, he couldn't fail."
I look forward to describing an alternative to cognitive appeals in my next post. Experiments in psychology suggest that we can employ motivationally effective means to help people articulate their most valued desires, by side-stepping anxiety and fear of failure.
“In Dreams Begin Responsibilities”