temptation bundling: When you're having trouble motivating yourself, try bundling a reward together with the thing that's hard to force yourself to do. [Like only watching reality TV when you're on the exercise machine.]
"Present self" is only concerned with immediate reward. "Future self" is concerned about long term goals, and is often hampered by what "present self" has indulged in...we have two selves and that they are in conflict, and this is a challenge we need to resolve, but some of us go through life without paying a lot of attention to this fact or trying to find ways to overcome it... Defaults are this amazing tool. What defaults do also is they harness our natural laziness, but actually turn it into an asset rather than a liability... e.g. [employees] can elect to be part of the retirement savings plan or not. It's just that, in one case, you have to elect to join the plan. In the other case, the default is that you're enrolled in the plan automatically and you have to elect to be out of the plan. In both cases, what you find is that people are reluctant, even to take the effort to check the box, of actually changing whatever the default is.
...for an individual who wants to improve their own outcomes, that if we can set defaults in our own lives and take advantage of our own tendency to go with the default, it will help us make better decisions... cash commitment devices are tools that research has proven can be really valuable to prevent future me from falling prey to present me's whims, because now the price tag is too high and we persist longer, we stick to our goals at a higher rate when it's too costly to fail... there is a 30% higher success rate among those who had access to this kind of a cash commitment device.
"tendency we have to overweigh whatever will provide instant gratification when we're doing a calculation and choosing between options, and to undervalue anything that will give us long-term rewards."
breaking big targets into a series of smaller goals: bite size invitation to do a small part of the big thing.
benefits of real-time feedback - for water use of all things, and they gave different groups shower faucets that either displayed how much water you were using in real time or simply tracked water use...As you might expect, it was incredibly valuable to be able to see in real-time just how much water you are using...when you're seeing it in real time, it's more salient, it's more vivid, and people cut back.
we saw spikes in the frequency of pursuing [new] goals at "chapter-breaks" - the start of a new week, the start of a new month, following people's birthdays, following holidays that we associate with new beginnings...Labor Day or New Year's, and less holidays like Valentine's Day.
this experience of hitting an important milestone on your birthday, or even moving to a new city, or a new country, and feeling like in some ways, you can wipe the slate clean... - an identity break - we feel like we're further from our past self...last year I couldn't quit smoking or get an exercise routine going, but that was the old me. The new me can do it...
figuring out how to encourage people to get a vaccine... the best performing message everywhere was a simple message reminding you to go get the vaccine and saying it's been reserved for you, or it's waiting for you... What we think is going on there is that, when someone tells you this vaccine has your name on it, it's first, it gives you the sense of ownership. We know from research on something called the endowment effect, that when you feel like something belongs to you, you're much more likely to want it.
I hope people take one thing away [is] the importance of thinking strategically, of recognizing...what your limitations are, what's holding you back, you can be much more successful because you can work around them.
Katy Milkman is the author of "How to Change: The Science of Getting from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be."
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