Put Your Imperfections Behind You

Abstract

People often fail to muster the motivation needed to initiate goal pursuit. Across five laboratory experiments, we explore when people naturally experience enhanced motivation to take actions that facilitate goal pursuit and why certain days are more likely to spur goal initiation than others. We provide causal evidence that emphasizing a temporal landmark marking 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.

Beyond Willpower: Strategies for Reducing Failures of Self-Control

“…Fresh-start framing. Both laboratory and field research suggests that there are predictable moments when people are especially motivated to make self-controlled decisions (Dai et al, 2014;Dai, Milkman, & Riis, 2015). One class of such moments arises at the beginning of new cycles (e.g., the start of a new week or year, following a birthday or holiday).…”

“…One class of such moments arises at the beginning of new cycles (e.g., the start of a new week or year, following a birthday or holiday). These so-called fresh-start moments facilitate the attainment of long-term goals because they help people feel disconnected from their past failures, which elevates their current self-image and confidence (Dai, Milkman, & Riis, 2015).…”

The Loss of Loss Aversion: Paying Attention to Reference Points

“…People sometimes show enhanced sensitivity to value around salient yet functionally meaningless points (Allen, Dechow, Pope, & Wu, 2016;Dai, Milkman, & Riis, 2014, 2015Pope & Simonsohn, 2011). For example, people increase donations closer to a mark of a round number (Pope & Simonsohn, 2011), and workers speed up before a break.…”

Effectiveness of Medication Adherence Reminders Tied to “Fresh Start” Dates

“…1 Well-designed reminders can increase adherence, 2 but when should reminders be sent to maximize impact? Prior observational studies 3 and laboratory experiments 4 have shown that engagement in healthy activities increases considerably following “fresh-start” dates—life and calendar events signaling the beginning of new cycles (e.g. birthdays or New Year’s).…”

“…birthdays or New Year’s). 3,4 Extending this insight, we conducted the first randomized controlled trial (RCT) examining whether sending medication adherence reminders around fresh-start dates and highlighting these dates as an opportunity for positive changes could boost reminders’ effectiveness.…”