Based on a random assignment, 700 participants were given either good or poor feedback on a trial cognitive test.
PhD Candidate Hallgeir Sjåstad
Why do we give up so easily?
If you fail to keep your New Year’s resolution to work out three times a week already in the first week of the year, that does not make it even more important for you to reach this goal. The opposite is the case.
Text: Sigrid Folkestad
PhD candidate Hallgeir Sjåstad has gained international attention for his comprehensive study of how people value future goals after a resounding failure.
Why do we give up so easily sometimes?
Physical exercise as an example
Maybe you didn’t get the grade you wanted in an exam or the job you hoped to get or a new best time in the ‘Stoltzen opp’ uphill race. What happens then? Do you value these goals more or less than before?
‘According to traditional scarcity models, when a valuable resource becomes scarce, we value it even more than before,’ Sjåstad explains. He is a research fellow at the Department of Strategy and Management at NHH.
‘We always imagine that the grass is greener on the other side. Lower supply means higher demand. But is this the case when people work towards a personal goal – and then fail?'
He found the very opposite to be the case in a series of experiments conducted in Norway and the USA.
Tested people
Based on a random assignment, 700 participants were given either good or poor feedback on a trial cognitive test. This meant that they believed they had either a good or poor chance of achieving a top score in the main part of the experiment, where they were to take another test. The results showed that those who were given poor feedback in the trial test thought they would be less happy if they were to achieve a top score in the main test, compared with those who received good feedback on the trial test. But when the participants actually achieved a top score in the main test, the participants in both groups were equally happy.
This means that those who believed that they would not manage to achieve a top score underestimated how happy they would feel if they nonetheless managed to do so.
‘This type of effect tells us that people do not always aim for the top, but are more drawn to what is within their reach. If you underestimate how good it will feel to succeed at the next attempt, this may reduce your motivation and willingness to make an effort when things do not go your way.’
Aesop’s fable and sour grapes
Hallgeir Sjåstad is a qualified psychologist and PhD candidate at the Department of Strategy and Management. He is affiliated to the behavioural research group The Choice Lab at NHH. He recently attended the prestigious SPSP conference on social psychology, which was held in San Antonio, USA. From a large number of submitted contributions, he was selected as part of a small group of 4 per cent whose research was accepted for presentation.
‘I actually took the idea from Aesop’s fable about the fox and the grapes,’ he says.
In the fable, the fox fails in its attempts to reach the sweet grapes because they are hanging too high up in the tree. As he stalks off, he mumbles, ‘Here I am wearing myself out to get a bunch of grapes that are probably sour anyway’.
Jon Elster
Sjåstad explains that the participants in his experiments reacted in the same way: They downgraded the value of the goal when they believed that it was unattainable. Norwegian philosopher Jon Elster calls effects of this type ‘adaptive preferences’.
The professional term for what the fox experiences is cognitive dissonance.
‘People have a fundamental need to have a positive and consistent self-image, which means that, when we try our very hardest, but fail, we do what we can to avoid devaluing ourselves. That’s why we devalue the goal instead. It’s a form of self-defence we use to avoid the bad feeling we get from continuing to value something we don’t believe we can achieve anyway.'
We may or may not be right
If you fail to keep your New Year’s resolution to work out three times a week already in the first week of the year, that does not make it even more important for you to reach this goal. The opposite is the case.
‘Isn’t that quite a rational way of thinking?’
‘Strictly speaking, it’s not rational because the assessments are inconsistent, but it can nonetheless be a useful way of thinking. But it’s only useful if our assumption that the goal is unattainable is correct, so that we can prioritise other goals instead. If you always give up after a defeat, on the other hand, you’ll get nowhere. And you won’t be very happy either.'
High achievers
In the study, Sjåstad and his co-authors also find that not everyone reacts to failure by devaluing the goal, but that there is a specific interplay between personal qualities and the situation.
Those who were highly motivated to do well prior to the experiment did not display a ‘sour grapes’ reaction to poor feedback.
‘Even after a resounding failure, they continued to think it would be really great to achieve a top score at the next attempt.'
Practice helps
‘So what do you do if you fail an exam or don’t do well at a job interview?’
‘Firstly, you can practise at trying again, even though you are afraid of failure. We know from previous studies that people overestimate how bad it will be to fail at something, because most of us are more adaptable than we think we are.’
Sjåstad´s studies show that people also underestimate how good it will feel if they reach their goal after having failed at the first attempt.
‘If you can live with the fact that you will sometimes experience personal failures, and perhaps even learn something from them, then it will be easier not to hit rock bottom the next time things go wrong.’
Fewer ambitious goals
‘Secondly, you can practise assessing when it is actually unrealistic that you will succeed next time even though you do your very best, so that in such cases you can move on and invest your efforts elsewhere.’
In line with Sjåstad’s findings, another piece of advice is to prioritise the most important goals and give other goals less priority.
'If you set yourself fewer ambitious goals at one time, you will be in a better position to tackle temporary setbacks. Research on self-control shows that people fail when they try to change everything at once. They spread their resources too thinly over too many projects,’ the PhD candidate believes.
‘Thirdly, the reaction pattern of highly motivated people demonstrates the value of choosing an area that you really like and are interested in, whether it is education, career or health. Make big life choices on the basis of what you are actually motivated by and are in a position to achieve,’ says Sjåstad.
Researching the future
The main theme of Sjåstad’s research is how people think about the future and make decisions involving time.
‘Almost every decision is about the future in one way or another. The future is always uncertain, however. We can never know what consequences the decisions we make right now will have. But we can assess and estimate, go with it and do our best.
We know from previous studies that people overestimate how bad it will be to fail at something, because most of us are more adaptable than we think we are.
PhD Candidate Hallgeir Sjåstad
And people do that all the time every single day – with varying success.
That’s what makes it so interesting to study how this actually takes place, and the factors that determine when we think in the long term and when we don’t,’ says Sjåstad.
At our best
‘By means of experiments,’ Sjåstad elaborates, ‘researchers can actually say quite a lot about these things, right down to what causal mechanisms drive these decisions.
Although our built-in tendency to think in the short term is a fundamental problem for mankind, there are nonetheless few things that distinguish us so clearly from other species as the ability to think very far ahead. No other species thinks about climate change, pension savings or what the world will be like in 200 years. But we can do so when we are at our best.
That is why it is important to find out what will make us do more of this and actually start acting on the basis of a long-term perspective as well.
You don’t have to be a climate scientist to understand that this is one of the biggest challenges we are currently facing. There’s still an awful lot we don’t know and don’t understand well enough,’ the NHH researcher concludes.
reference:
Sjåstad, H., Baumeister, R. F., & Ent, M.R. 2017 Greener grass or sour grapes? How people value future rewards after initial failure. Unpublished manuscript (in review).