It’s complicated. And depends on the way those people treat your goals.
Scenario 1: you post on facebook “This month I want to lose 1kg, I am worried I can’t do it—you guys should show me support”. Your friends; being the best of rationalist friends; believe your instructions are thought out and planned. In the interest of complying with your request you get 17 likes and 10 comments of “wow awesome” and “you go man” and “that’s the way to do it”. Even longer ones of, “good planning will help you achieve your goals”, and some guy saying how he lost 2 kilos in a month, so 1kg should be easy as cake.
when you read all the posts your brain goes “wow, lost weight like that”, “earn’t the adoration of my friends for doing the thing”, I feel great! So you have a party, eat what you like, relax and enjoy that feeling. One month later you managed to gain a kilo not lose one.
Scenario 2: You post on facebook, “This month I want to lose 2kg (since last month wasn’t so great). So all of you better hold me to that, and help me get there”. In the interest of complying with you, all your rational friends post things like, “Yea right”, “I’ll believe it when I see it”. “you couldn’t do 1kg last month, what makes you think you can do it now?”, “I predict he will lose one kilo but then put it back on again. haha”, “you’re so full of it. You want to lose weight; I expect to see you running with me at 8am 3 times a week”. two weeks later someone posts to your wall, “hows the weight loss going? I think you failed already”, and two people comment, “I bet he did”, and “actually he did come running in the morning”.
When you read all the posts your brain goes; “looks like I gotta prove it to them that I can do this, and hey this could be easy if they help me exercise”. After two weeks you are starting to lose track of the initial momentum, the chocolate is starting to move to the front of the cupboard again. When you see the post on your wall you double down; throw out the chocolate so it’s not in your temptation, and message the runner that you will be there tomorrow. After a month you actually did it, reporting back to your friends they actually congratulate you for your work; “my predictions were wrong; updating my beliefs”, “congratulations”, “teach me how you did it”..
Those scenarios were made up, but its designed to show that it depends entirely on the circumstances of your sharing your goals and the atmosphere in which you do it as well as how you treat the events surrounding sharing your goals.
Given that in scenario 2 asking for help yielded an exercise partner, and scenario 1 only yielded encouragement—there is a clear distinction between useful goal-sharing and less-useful goal sharing.
Yes; some goal sharing is ineffective; but some can be effective. Up to you whether you take the effective pathways or not.
addendum: treat people’s goals the right way; not the wrong way. Make a prediction on what you think will happen then ask them critical questions. If something sounds unrealistic—gently prod them in the direction of being more realistic (emphasis on gentle). (relevant example) “what happens over the xmas silly season when there is going to be lots of food around—how will you avoid putting on weight?”, “do you plan to exercise?”, “what do you plan to do differently from last month?”. DO NOT reward people for not achieving their goals.
Scenario 2 sound like it would be bad for me as well as scenario 1. I’m fairly uncomfortable talking about weight goals with most people—it feels like it would be saying I’m too fat or something negative like that, so unless they’ve revealed a similar problem to me I don’t go there. So in that situation I’d expect to feel insulted. It’s not a failure mode that I fall into any more, but where I was expecting that scenario to go is “When you read all the posts your brain goes; yeah this is too hard, I feel bad, I want chocolate. And at the end of the month you’ve gained a kilo.”
Might be gender-related. Women experiencing that sort of discussion to go in the direction of judging appearance along with a greater negative affect from being judged unattractive. Men experiencing it being treated as just another health-related goal and being less concerned with judgment if they admit failure.
It’s possible that if I did made such a post and read those responses it would go better than that, but it would be anxiety-inducing for me to go about testing that. Tentative suggestion: sharing goals I feel like I “should” be achieving is bad, sharing goals I just want to achieve is variable but expected positive.
there is probably a gender variability on this issue.
The paper seems to suggest a specific hypothesis as to why:
your brain does the “I got all the congratulations, I must be done” process and this causes you to not try as hard on your goal. I don’t know how true that theory is, but it seems reasonable.
I (try to) maintain a two tier system where I tell advisers and people I know who will hold me accountable what my exact goals are, and maintain silence with everyone else.
In practice this gets a bit messy when E.G my mastermind group knows what company I’m building but my parents and girlfriend has no idea. It can be very hard to maintain this, and another strategy I’ve begun to adopt is being vague about my goals (e.g. “I’ve got some interested investment in a disruptive education idea and currently trying to work out the details” and tell people “I’ll have more for you in a month or so”. This seems to give them an incentive to follow up, and me an incentive to want to actually deliver so I can tell them what I’m actually up to.
It’s complicated again. Trouble is that you have the potential to miss out on opportunities. i.e. before I start a project in the electronics space, I mention it to my friends who are interested in electronics; they then have the opportunity to say, “Oh here’s some information I found earlier” or “here let me help you with that”; in various ways that you don’t get to take advantage of if you secretly hide all the things you do until they are done.
It’s complicated again. Trouble is that you have the potential to miss out on opportunities.
Sure, but that’s true for anything. It’s bad for your life expectancty to smoke cigarettes, but it’s also possible that while you are out smoking a cigarette, the building you work in catches fire and collapses.
I will concede that there are exceptions to every general rule and situations where following the general rule works against you.
What we’re really talking about is the balance of the two sides.
Given that: sometimes goal sharing will be bad sometimes goal sharing will be good
I am suggesting that the balance falls on a mix of:
mostly good
you make what you want out of it and there is no automatic win-state.
I assume you are suggesting:
mostly bad
hard to convert to a win-state when fighting your own brain chemistry.
This whole issue compounds when you consider the starting state of the person; whether sharing a goal is outside or inside a comfort zone (and easy or hard to do); and again—the environment in which the goal sharing happens.
I am pretty sure we can’t get much further on convincing one another of a different state of balance… Especially without more evidence either way.
On top of that—we might genuinely be living in different states of the world where your world is more how you describe it and my world is more how I describe it.
Given that the last point might be true; Which state of the world would you rather live in?
At the end of the video: that link takes you to the timestamp. (its pretty much what I said above)
I have to admit I only read the first few paragraphs of the transcript earlier and only now went through the entire thing. Looks like your source agrees with me.
it depends entirely on the circumstances of your sharing your goals and the atmosphere in which you do it as well as how you treat the events surrounding sharing your goals.
I’d encourage a from first principles approach. where my early reasoning encompassed your initial ideas and went on to explain why that doesn’t explain enough of the observation, and how to take advantage of a different state of the world..
See also: accountability partners. as a thing that happens a lot these days.
So if this is true, what can we do? Well, you could resist the temptation to announce your goal. You can delay the gratification that the social acknowledgment brings, and you can understand that your mind mistakes the talking for the doing. But if you do need to talk about something, you can state it in a way that gives you no satisfaction, such as, “I really want to run this marathon, so I need to train five times a week and kick my ass if I don’t, okay?”
Sounds like he says there is a way to share goals without getting the negative attributes.
Sounds like he says there is a way to share goals without getting the negative attributes.
Right. In other words he is stating that there may be exceptions to the general rule.
By contrast, your position is (apparently) that general rule is that sharing goals is productive and beneficial. And I am again asking you for the evidence which supports your position.
Our findings are also important from an applied perspective.
Given that the effect is limited to committed individuals—those
who are most eager to reach their identity goals—an important
question is how these individuals might try to escape this effect.
Future research might address this question by exploring various
routes. First, might it suffice to increase the need for consistency
(Cialdini & Trost, 1998) by attending to relevant norms?
Or is it also necessary to increase perceived accountability
(Lerner & Tetlock, 1999) by considering relevant attributes of
the audience (e.g., power) or by specifying one’s behavioral intention
in a particular way (e.g., spelling out specific frequency
or quality standards vs. stating only that one wants to do one’s
best; Locke & Latham, 2002) so that the audience can more
easily check on its enactment? Second, might it also be effective
for one to furnish a behavioral intention with a plan for how to
enact it —that is, to form a corresponding implementation intention
(e.g., ‘‘If situation X is encountered, then I will perform
the intended behavior Y’’; Gollwitzer, 1999; Gollwitzer &
Sheeran, 2006)? As such if-then plans delegate the control of a
person’s behavior to situational cues, the intended behavior
should be executed when the critical cue arises, whether or not
the expression of the behavioral intention had been acknowledged
by other people. Third, recent research by Fishbach and
her colleagues (Fishbach & Dhar, 2005; Koo & Fishbach, 2008)
suggests that interpreting a behavioral performance in terms of
indicating commitment to a goal enhances further goal striving,
whereas conceiving of a performance in terms of progress toward
a goal reduces further goal striving. This implies that a behavioral
intention worded to indicate a strong commitment to the
identity goal (e.g., ‘‘I want to write a paper to become a great
scientist’’) should be less negatively affected by social reality
than a behavioral intention that implies progress toward the
identity goal (e.g., ‘‘I intend to write a paper, as is done by great
scientists’’).
Finally, from a goal-systems (Kruglanski et al., 2002) or goalhierarchy
(Vallacher & Wegner, 1987) perspective on action
control, **it stands to reason that any striving for goals—and not
just identity goals—that can be attained by various behavioral
routes (means) is vulnerable to the negative effects of social
reality on the enactment of behavioral intentions. If a person is
highly committed to a superordinate goal, and if public recognition
of a behavioral intention specifying the use of one route to
the goal engenders a sense of goal attainment, then the enactment
of this very intention should be hampered. Recent research
by Fishbach, Dhar, and Zhang (2006) is in line with this reasoning,
showing that success on a subgoal (e.g., eating healthy
meals) in the service of a superordinate goal (i.e., keeping in
shape) reduces striving for alternative subgoals (e.g., going to
the gym).**
that’s all I got. Future research is needed. But also it matters the environment and how you share.
Umm, that article completely supports my position:
When other people take notice of one’s identity-relevant behavioral intentions, one’s performance of the intended behaviors is compromised. This effect occurs both when the intentions are experimenter supplied and when they are self-generated, and is observed in both immediate performance and performance
measured over a period of 1 week.
If this is the only evidence you have—besides your own logic and common sense—then you may want to rethink your position.
Given that the effect is limited to committed individuals—those who are most eager to reach their identity goals
Future research might address this question
Future research is needed to solve this question. This means that future research is needed to solve the question. Until then; it seems that we can’t resolve this without the future research. I hold a position that is built off of your position as a foundation, using the same sources (and their conclusions), and some reasoning from first principles based on comments in the article.
Given that the effect is limited to committed individuals—those who are most eager to reach their identity goals—an important question is how these individuals might try to escape this effect.
and
Given that: sometimes goal sharing will be bad sometimes goal sharing will be good
I suspect the “mostly good or mostly bad?” will come down to subjective experience. So that’s a pretty ordinary question to be trying to obtain future research for. In which case—the important question is—How might we make (or ensure) goal sharing (is) mostly good and mostly not bad? (or always good)
as in bold above) How might we make (or ensure) goal sharing (is) mostly good and mostly not bad?
Ok, but that’s a different issue. My position is that generally speaking, goal-sharing is counterproductive. Your position is that generally speaking, goal sharing is beneficial and productive. The evidence supports my position. You have offered no evidence to support your position and instead you have attempted to change the subject.
I’m gonna tap out of this. I would suggest re-reading that evidence. Especially that paper and the conclusion of that paper where it doesn’t actually say that.
It says things like this:
Other people’s taking notice of one’s identity-relevant intentions apparently engenders a premature sense of completeness regarding the identity goal.
An identity-relevant intention is potentially different to a goal or a plan. To make the most use of this research it would be wise to identify the difference and make use of the right mechanisms.
I’m gonna tap out of this. I would suggest re-reading that evidence. Especially that paper and the conclusion of that paper where it doesn’t actually say that.
Doesn’t actually say what? Never mind, because it seems you don’t have a clear understanding of what you are talking about.
An identity-relevant intention is potentially different to a goal or a plan
Then perhaps your evidence is irrelevant to both your position and mine. If so, it’s your problem not mine. Because it wouldn’t change the fact that all of the evidence supports my position and you haven’t cited any evidence to support your own.
My two cents:
Don’t tell people your goals!!
https://www.ted.com/talks/derek_sivers_keep_your_goals_to_yourself?language=en
It’s complicated. And depends on the way those people treat your goals.
Scenario 1: you post on facebook “This month I want to lose 1kg, I am worried I can’t do it—you guys should show me support”. Your friends; being the best of rationalist friends; believe your instructions are thought out and planned. In the interest of complying with your request you get 17 likes and 10 comments of “wow awesome” and “you go man” and “that’s the way to do it”. Even longer ones of, “good planning will help you achieve your goals”, and some guy saying how he lost 2 kilos in a month, so 1kg should be easy as cake.
when you read all the posts your brain goes “wow, lost weight like that”, “earn’t the adoration of my friends for doing the thing”, I feel great! So you have a party, eat what you like, relax and enjoy that feeling. One month later you managed to gain a kilo not lose one.
Scenario 2: You post on facebook, “This month I want to lose 2kg (since last month wasn’t so great). So all of you better hold me to that, and help me get there”. In the interest of complying with you, all your rational friends post things like, “Yea right”, “I’ll believe it when I see it”. “you couldn’t do 1kg last month, what makes you think you can do it now?”, “I predict he will lose one kilo but then put it back on again. haha”, “you’re so full of it. You want to lose weight; I expect to see you running with me at 8am 3 times a week”. two weeks later someone posts to your wall, “hows the weight loss going? I think you failed already”, and two people comment, “I bet he did”, and “actually he did come running in the morning”.
When you read all the posts your brain goes; “looks like I gotta prove it to them that I can do this, and hey this could be easy if they help me exercise”. After two weeks you are starting to lose track of the initial momentum, the chocolate is starting to move to the front of the cupboard again. When you see the post on your wall you double down; throw out the chocolate so it’s not in your temptation, and message the runner that you will be there tomorrow. After a month you actually did it, reporting back to your friends they actually congratulate you for your work; “my predictions were wrong; updating my beliefs”, “congratulations”, “teach me how you did it”..
Those scenarios were made up, but its designed to show that it depends entirely on the circumstances of your sharing your goals and the atmosphere in which you do it as well as how you treat the events surrounding sharing your goals.
Given that in scenario 2 asking for help yielded an exercise partner, and scenario 1 only yielded encouragement—there is a clear distinction between useful goal-sharing and less-useful goal sharing.
Yes; some goal sharing is ineffective; but some can be effective. Up to you whether you take the effective pathways or not.
addendum: treat people’s goals the right way; not the wrong way. Make a prediction on what you think will happen then ask them critical questions. If something sounds unrealistic—gently prod them in the direction of being more realistic (emphasis on gentle). (relevant example) “what happens over the xmas silly season when there is going to be lots of food around—how will you avoid putting on weight?”, “do you plan to exercise?”, “what do you plan to do differently from last month?”. DO NOT reward people for not achieving their goals.
Scenario 2 sound like it would be bad for me as well as scenario 1. I’m fairly uncomfortable talking about weight goals with most people—it feels like it would be saying I’m too fat or something negative like that, so unless they’ve revealed a similar problem to me I don’t go there. So in that situation I’d expect to feel insulted. It’s not a failure mode that I fall into any more, but where I was expecting that scenario to go is “When you read all the posts your brain goes; yeah this is too hard, I feel bad, I want chocolate. And at the end of the month you’ve gained a kilo.”
Might be gender-related. Women experiencing that sort of discussion to go in the direction of judging appearance along with a greater negative affect from being judged unattractive. Men experiencing it being treated as just another health-related goal and being less concerned with judgment if they admit failure.
It’s possible that if I did made such a post and read those responses it would go better than that, but it would be anxiety-inducing for me to go about testing that. Tentative suggestion: sharing goals I feel like I “should” be achieving is bad, sharing goals I just want to achieve is variable but expected positive.
there is probably a gender variability on this issue.
The paper seems to suggest a specific hypothesis as to why: your brain does the “I got all the congratulations, I must be done” process and this causes you to not try as hard on your goal. I don’t know how true that theory is, but it seems reasonable.
I am keen for future research in the area.
I would not be surprised if you were right to an extent, but I think in general the more careful thing to do is to maintain radio silence.
I (try to) maintain a two tier system where I tell advisers and people I know who will hold me accountable what my exact goals are, and maintain silence with everyone else.
In practice this gets a bit messy when E.G my mastermind group knows what company I’m building but my parents and girlfriend has no idea. It can be very hard to maintain this, and another strategy I’ve begun to adopt is being vague about my goals (e.g. “I’ve got some interested investment in a disruptive education idea and currently trying to work out the details” and tell people “I’ll have more for you in a month or so”. This seems to give them an incentive to follow up, and me an incentive to want to actually deliver so I can tell them what I’m actually up to.
It’s complicated again. Trouble is that you have the potential to miss out on opportunities. i.e. before I start a project in the electronics space, I mention it to my friends who are interested in electronics; they then have the opportunity to say, “Oh here’s some information I found earlier” or “here let me help you with that”; in various ways that you don’t get to take advantage of if you secretly hide all the things you do until they are done.
You could compromise between the two, by telling friends who are genuinely supportive/helpful/motivating, but declining to broadcast.
Most definitely; it’s about knowing how/why these things happen and making the best of the effects.
Sure, but that’s true for anything. It’s bad for your life expectancty to smoke cigarettes, but it’s also possible that while you are out smoking a cigarette, the building you work in catches fire and collapses.
I will concede that there are exceptions to every general rule and situations where following the general rule works against you.
What we’re really talking about is the balance of the two sides.
Given that:
sometimes goal sharing will be bad
sometimes goal sharing will be good
I am suggesting that the balance falls on a mix of:
mostly good
you make what you want out of it and there is no automatic win-state.
I assume you are suggesting:
mostly bad
hard to convert to a win-state when fighting your own brain chemistry.
This whole issue compounds when you consider the starting state of the person; whether sharing a goal is outside or inside a comfort zone (and easy or hard to do); and again—the environment in which the goal sharing happens.
I am pretty sure we can’t get much further on convincing one another of a different state of balance… Especially without more evidence either way.
On top of that—we might genuinely be living in different states of the world where your world is more how you describe it and my world is more how I describe it.
Given that the last point might be true; Which state of the world would you rather live in?
So it sounds like you are saying that, generally speaking, goal sharing is not counter-productive and is in fact beneficial. Is that right?
Well what is the evidence which supports your position?
yes.
https://www.ted.com/talks/derek_sivers_keep_your_goals_to_yourself/transcript?language=en#t-141000
At the end of the video: that link takes you to the timestamp. (its pretty much what I said above)
I have to admit I only read the first few paragraphs of the transcript earlier and only now went through the entire thing. Looks like your source agrees with me.
I’d encourage a from first principles approach. where my early reasoning encompassed your initial ideas and went on to explain why that doesn’t explain enough of the observation, and how to take advantage of a different state of the world..
See also: accountability partners. as a thing that happens a lot these days.
Ok.
Not sure how you get that. Pretty clearly he is saying that in general it’s better not to share your goals.
Anyway, please answer my question:
What is the evidence which supports your position?
I quote from the last 40 seconds of the video:
Sounds like he says there is a way to share goals without getting the negative attributes.
Right. In other words he is stating that there may be exceptions to the general rule.
By contrast, your position is (apparently) that general rule is that sharing goals is productive and beneficial. And I am again asking you for the evidence which supports your position.
http://www.psych.nyu.edu/gollwitzer/09_Gollwitzer_Sheeran_Seifert_Michalski_When_Intentions_.pdf
Our findings are also important from an applied perspective. Given that the effect is limited to committed individuals—those who are most eager to reach their identity goals—an important question is how these individuals might try to escape this effect. Future research might address this question by exploring various routes. First, might it suffice to increase the need for consistency (Cialdini & Trost, 1998) by attending to relevant norms? Or is it also necessary to increase perceived accountability (Lerner & Tetlock, 1999) by considering relevant attributes of the audience (e.g., power) or by specifying one’s behavioral intention in a particular way (e.g., spelling out specific frequency or quality standards vs. stating only that one wants to do one’s best; Locke & Latham, 2002) so that the audience can more easily check on its enactment? Second, might it also be effective for one to furnish a behavioral intention with a plan for how to enact it —that is, to form a corresponding implementation intention (e.g., ‘‘If situation X is encountered, then I will perform the intended behavior Y’’; Gollwitzer, 1999; Gollwitzer & Sheeran, 2006)? As such if-then plans delegate the control of a person’s behavior to situational cues, the intended behavior should be executed when the critical cue arises, whether or not the expression of the behavioral intention had been acknowledged by other people. Third, recent research by Fishbach and her colleagues (Fishbach & Dhar, 2005; Koo & Fishbach, 2008) suggests that interpreting a behavioral performance in terms of indicating commitment to a goal enhances further goal striving, whereas conceiving of a performance in terms of progress toward a goal reduces further goal striving. This implies that a behavioral intention worded to indicate a strong commitment to the identity goal (e.g., ‘‘I want to write a paper to become a great scientist’’) should be less negatively affected by social reality than a behavioral intention that implies progress toward the identity goal (e.g., ‘‘I intend to write a paper, as is done by great scientists’’). Finally, from a goal-systems (Kruglanski et al., 2002) or goalhierarchy (Vallacher & Wegner, 1987) perspective on action control, **it stands to reason that any striving for goals—and not just identity goals—that can be attained by various behavioral routes (means) is vulnerable to the negative effects of social reality on the enactment of behavioral intentions. If a person is highly committed to a superordinate goal, and if public recognition of a behavioral intention specifying the use of one route to the goal engenders a sense of goal attainment, then the enactment of this very intention should be hampered. Recent research by Fishbach, Dhar, and Zhang (2006) is in line with this reasoning, showing that success on a subgoal (e.g., eating healthy meals) in the service of a superordinate goal (i.e., keeping in shape) reduces striving for alternative subgoals (e.g., going to
the gym).**
that’s all I got. Future research is needed. But also it matters the environment and how you share.
Umm, that article completely supports my position:
If this is the only evidence you have—besides your own logic and common sense—then you may want to rethink your position.
Like I said:
Future research is needed to solve this question. This means that future research is needed to solve the question. Until then; it seems that we can’t resolve this without the future research. I hold a position that is built off of your position as a foundation, using the same sources (and their conclusions), and some reasoning from first principles based on comments in the article.
Exactly what question?
and
is goal sharing mostly good or mostly bad?
So this is the question which requires “future research” according to you?
is a line from the conclusion of that paper.
I suspect the “mostly good or mostly bad?” will come down to subjective experience. So that’s a pretty ordinary question to be trying to obtain future research for. In which case—the important question is—How might we make (or ensure) goal sharing (is) mostly good and mostly not bad? (or always good)
Umm, does that mean “yes” or “no”?
Please just state the question which requires “future research” so that I can understand what you are saying.
(as in bold above) How might we make (or ensure) goal sharing (is) mostly good and mostly not bad?
Ok, but that’s a different issue. My position is that generally speaking, goal-sharing is counterproductive. Your position is that generally speaking, goal sharing is beneficial and productive. The evidence supports my position. You have offered no evidence to support your position and instead you have attempted to change the subject.
I’m gonna tap out of this. I would suggest re-reading that evidence. Especially that paper and the conclusion of that paper where it doesn’t actually say that.
It says things like this:
An identity-relevant intention is potentially different to a goal or a plan. To make the most use of this research it would be wise to identify the difference and make use of the right mechanisms.
Good luck with your future in the goal-space.
Doesn’t actually say what? Never mind, because it seems you don’t have a clear understanding of what you are talking about.
Then perhaps your evidence is irrelevant to both your position and mine. If so, it’s your problem not mine. Because it wouldn’t change the fact that all of the evidence supports my position and you haven’t cited any evidence to support your own.
Thanks you too.