(pensive music)
Narrator: When we set goals like hitting a sales target or being more productive at work, what factors influence our success? Does setting an ambitious goal ratchet up your self-confidence, or is the goal itself a product of your expectations? Chicago Booth’s Avner Strulov-Shlain and his coauthor have been digging into these questions, trying to figure out what makes the difference when it comes to realizing our ambitions.
Avner Strulov-Shlain: When people set goals for themselves, we usually do it when we have something that we’re not sure we can do without a goal, right? It’s something hard like exercising more or dieting or completing a task we don’t really want to complete. And we wanna do more, and we don’t have something else in our tool kit besides setting a goal. But goals don’t come out of thin air. Goals come out of something that we think we might be able to achieve. It might be easier or harder, but it’s somewhere coming from within ourselves when we decide how much we want to do. And this relationship of how does our beliefs impact our goals, and how do those together then impact what we end up doing?
Narrator: To solve this question, the researchers ran a study where participants were asked to perform a repetitive task, counting 1s in a grid table of 0s and 1s. For the exercise, participants received training which varied in its difficulty, and some were asked to set goals for the task. Among those who set goals, some were encouraged to set ambitious goals, while others set more attainable ones. This allowed the researchers to analyze how expectations and goal setting impacted performance. (gentle music)
Avner Strulov-Shlain: So because we vary the expectations and we vary just the baseline “set a goal,” that tells us how much do people respond to the training. And people respond fairly strongly. So if they did an easy training, they set a higher goal. If they did a harder training, they set a lower goal. And so expectations affected goals. We can also look, and something else we did at the end of this training phase was to elicit people’s expectations of how many tables do you think you’ll complete? And it’s not just a number; it’s the full distribution. “I think there’s so-and-so chance that I will solve at least one or at least five or at least 10,” etc. So we can also see—we measure these expectations for everyone—and we can see if just setting a goal changes expectations. It does not. And we can see if setting a higher or lower goal changes expectations, and it doesn’t really. There is some small effect when people chose an easier goal, then they move their expectations slightly down. So they expect to do a little less, but setting a more ambitious goal than the one they set in the first place didn’t change what they thought they will do. So what it implies is that in our setting, is that the goals represented what people expected to do rather than affect what people thought they will do. And that’s one important distinction here.
Narrator: So if expectations strongly influence goals, and setting goals doesn’t change expectations, what effect does setting goals have on one’s performance? In the experiment, it improved performance by 6.5 percent compared to no goal. So just having a goal may improve performance. But does the difficulty level of the goal affect how likely people are to push themselves to achieve more?
Avner Strulov-Shlain: When we look at the effects on performance, the different training difficulty, which changed expectations, changed performance by quite a bit. People who expected the task to be easier expected to do more, actually did more. People who expected the task to be harder actually did less. And we can kind of decouple the effects to see that about half of the people just said, “OK, it’s too hard. I’m not even gonna try.” But the other half tried a few to do a bit and quit early compared to those who had higher expectations, that thought it would be easier. And remember, everyone did the same exact task. So it’s not that it was easier or harder for anyone.
Narrator: The researchers found that the difficulty level of the goal itself had no significant effect on performance when controlling for expectation. Furthermore, most participants set goals they believed they had a high chance of achieving. The research suggests that while the specific difficulty of a goal may not be crucial, setting goals still boosts motivation, and success often hinges on the optimism and confidence we bring to the effort.
