Work

Put Your Imperfections Behind You

Year: 2015

Type: article

Abstract: People often fail to muster the motivation needed to initiate goal pursuit. Across five laboratory experiments, we explored occasions when people naturally experience enhanced motivation to take actions that facilitate goal pursuit and why certain dates are more likely to spur goal initiation than others. We present causal evidence that emphasizing a temporal landmark denoting the beginning of a new time period increases people's intentions to initiate goal pursuit. In addition, we propose and show that people's strengthened motivation to begin pursuing their aspirations following such temporal landmarks originates in part from the psychological disassociation these landmarks induce from a person's past, imperfect self.

Source: Psychological Science

DOI: 10.1177/0956797615605818

Authors: Hengchen Dai, Katherine L. Milkman, Jason Riis

Institutions: Washington University in St. Louis, University of Pennsylvania

Language: English

Topic: Behavioral Health and Interventions

Subfield: Applied Psychology

Field: Psychology

Domain: Social Sciences

Open Access status: green

Funder: National Institute on Aging

Awards: G3080525841, The Penn Roybal Center on Behavioral Economics and Health: Solving for Scale and Impact with Design Thinking, Digital Platforms, and Dynamic Adaptation