His hair, which had been combed neatly to the right in his yearbook photos, now fell in a loose mess around his ears. He looked over at the judge and at his lawyer. He appeared to stand on his tiptoes for a moment, peering through the bars at the gallery where his parents and a couple of family friends sat. From his cage in the far back of a courtroom in Newport Beach, California, Sam Woodward looked around. You can connect with her on Google+ and Twitter, or view her latest articles here. She writes about everything from lifehacks and career advice to learning tips and the latest research in education. Marianne Stenger is a writer with Open Colleges, one of Australia’s leading online education providers. This way, when the going gets tough, or someone is ready to give up, you can remind them that the path they chose was voluntary: They didn’t have to do it they wanted to.
When it comes to helping other people accomplish what they set out to do, the researchers suggest adopting an approach of giving people a “do-nothing” option whenever possible. By using the right incentive structures, one can drastically reduce or eliminate the tendency of opting out, while maintaining the positive impact that no-choice options have on persistence.” - Schrift
Sticking to a diet, regularly visiting the gym and working through personal or professional challenges are all instances in which persisting is beneficial and important.
We can learn to bolster goal attainment by merely giving ourselves the option of doing nothing, and this is a learning mechanism that can be applied in many different scenarios. If presented first, it didn’t help participants perform better.Īpplying the no-choice learning mechanism in your everyday life But there was one catch: the no-choice option had to be presented alongside the A or B choices.
In each case, the researchers found that when they had the option of doing nothing, participants became more tenacious. The other was a no-choice condition, where they could choose between A, B or nothing. One was a forced-choice condition, where participants had to pick between choices A or B. To test the theory, Schrift and his colleagues carried out three separate experiments to observe people in different conditions. But a more likely explanation for your good deed is that you felt subtle outside pressure to return the wallet - perhaps you wanted to impress those around you.īecause you fail to recognize this pressure, you draw the conclusion that you’re honest and kind, and as a result, you begin to modify future attitudes and actions to match this self-perception. If you ever returned a lost wallet, you probably told yourself you did it because you’re an honest person. These findings tie in with the self-perception theory, which says we draw conclusions about who we are from the behaviors we engage in. You’d probably do your best to stick with the new routine for a week or two, but give up once the novelty wears off.īut if you’d given yourself the option of not doing any exercise at all and still picked the morning jog, you’d be more likely to push through the adversity because you know you’d rather jog than not exercise at all.īy simply rephrasing the question, you learned something about your attitude and preferences.
Schriftįor instance, if you give yourself the option of going to the gym after work or jogging before work, you might choose the second option, but without knowing why. Just knowing that fact helps us persist longer when there’s adversity or hardship. However, if I choose something, I learn about my preferences. It sounds counterintuitive because we assume that the option of doing nothing reduces persistence. ( Click here to tweet this thought.)Īlter your decision-making technique Research conducted by Wharton and Georgia State University professors shows that we can induce desirable outcomes by simply altering our decision-making technique.īehavioral scientist and lead researcher Rom Schrift explains that it can be useful to allow ourselves the luxury of a “do-nothing” alternative, because it teaches us something about our preferences and motivates us to see goals through to the end. Being productive when your to-do list is endless often means making difficult choices about what comes first, and “nothing” rarely gets a place on that priority list.īut though it might seem counterproductive, behavioral scientists believe that introducing the option of doing nothing into a set of choices helps you get more done.