"If you can, you must." Why we set ever higher goals

The psychology of chasing our potential

In 1963, Heinrich Böll wrote a short story that became famous worldwide about a businessman and a fisherman. The scene depicts a businessman asking a fisherman, who is idle in his boat, why he is not going to sea again to catch more fish. The fisherman answers that he went in the morning and:

My catch was so good that […] I have enough for tomorrow and the day after tomorrow. - Böll (1963)

The businessman then decides to give him a short lesson in economics. If you go again, you’ll catch more fish, he says. Do it regularly and you’ll have enough money to get several boats, to open a restaurant, to get a factory, and then… “What then?” asks the fisherman. “Then you may relax here in the harbour with your mind set at ease, doze in the sunshine and look out on the magnificent sea.” “But that’s what I am doing just now” answers the man in the boat.

The story strikes by the absurdity of the businessman's recommendation. He urges the fisherman to work hard, only to eventually return to enjoying what he is doing now. It is usually presented as a cautionary tale about the nonsensical materialist drive towards accumulating ever more wealth.

However, this story points to a more fundamental psychological paradox: while we seem to have a choice in setting our aspirations, we often do not use this freedom to set modest aspirations that would allow us to be content with what we have now, like the fisherman. Instead, we frequently feel the need to chase ever more, seeking an elusive future satisfaction, like the businessman

Shooting for the stars

The study of goal setting has found that people often set high and hard-to-achieve goals. They set their mind on symbolic achievements and work hard toward them, be it to accomplish an athletic feat or to complete a stamp collection.

Why didn’t they simply stay at home and watch Netflix?

They also use their past best performances as goals to surpass. This is something runners and cyclists using apps like Strava—that remind them of their best performance on every stretch of road—are familiar with. In another domain, chess, a study found that players seem to exert extra effort to improve their best ratings (Anderson and Green, 2018).

Symbolic thresholds are also chosen as goals. A study of marathon runners found that their times bunch below 5-hour, 4-hour and 3-hour marks, as well as intermediate half-hour marks. Runners behave as if they are willing to put in the extra effort to go just below these thresholds (Allen et al., 2017).

Distribution of finishing times in marathons (1970-2013), from Allen et al. (2017)

The motivational effect of goals

The first step in understanding why people do this is to observe that goals are motivating. The psychological literature on goal setting (Locke and Latham, 1990) has investigated the role of goals on performance. Setting goals has been found to have a significant motivational impact and increase performance, at least when goals are challenging and are neither too easy nor too hard to reach.

Heath, Larrick and Wu (1999), in a highly cited paper, proposed that goals' effect on motivation derives from the fact that they act as a reference point within the framework of Kahneman and Tversky’s prospect theory.

Subjective value functions for two different goals in terms of performance. An individual with a higher goal (40, right curve) will experience a greater subjective benefit from completing the last steps up to that level of performance than an individual with a lower goal (30, left curve). From Heath, Larrick and Wu (1999)

From that perspective, the subjective value function—that can be interpreted as reflecting our subjective satisfaction—is steeper close to a goal, including due to loss aversion. As a consequence, it motivates us to work hard to achieve that goal. However, the psychological literature on goal setting has not reached a definitive understanding of how goals are set, what factors contribute to shaping the level of goals people set for themselves, and why.

If you can, you must

In the previous post, I explained that we are not designed to be happy; instead, happiness is evolution’s trick to incentivise us to make good decisions and be successful. Good outcomes feel good, and bad outcomes feel bad. Anticipating these we carefully choose the best options and the most auspicious prospects.

An adaptive explanation of happiness suggests something more: it should not be simply designed to help us make good decisions. It should be designed to nudge us toward the best decisions possible. In short, happiness should incentivise us to achieve our potential, the highest level of success we can reach. This potential depends on the contexts we face. Identifying it therefore requires interpreting the information we may have about the opportunities and risks associated with different possible actions. For instance, consider a hypothetical situation where you get a job offer: should you keep your current job or take another job, which is perhaps more uncertain but offers higher opportunities for progression?

A possible solution to this problem is for evolution to incentivise us to set aspiration levels to the level of our expectations about our potential. In other words: we should be designed to aim to achieve the best outcome we are likely able to reach. This perspective explains the psychology of goal-setting. We set goals—another word for aspiration levels—to the highest level of what we think we can achieve.

Why do we do this, instead of finding happiness in low aspirations? Greg Kubitz and I recently released a paper showing that a simple explanation is that our hedonic system can push us to be ambitious. We enjoy the idea of setting high goals we could achieve. It is the excitement of feeling “I can do it”.

The good feeling of setting high goals and the fear of failing too ambitious goals should balance each other, inducing us to set our aspirations to the best achievement we can reach, but not higher. How we set goals then becomes easier to understand. We use all the possible information we have to identify the best achievements we can reach: our past experience, the feedback we receive on our chances, the achievements of peers similar to us, and the generic information we may access about our opportunities. All these elements play a role in shaping our aspirations and therefore the goals we set for ourselves. Personal goals tend to be ambitious because we are internally rewarded for identifying the highest success level we can reach.

Adaptation and recalibration

When our circumstances change, we habituate to new contexts. After the success or failure associated with our goals, the same process of habituation takes place. In the process, we reset our aspirations about what we can achieve. In his book The Happiness Hypothesis (2006), psychologist Jonathan Haidt says about this:

We don’t just habituate, we recalibrate. We create for ourselves a world of targets, and each time we hit one we replace it with another. After a string of successes we aim higher; after a massive setback, such as a broken neck, we aim lower… we surround ourselves with goals, hopes, and expectations, and then feel pleasure and pain in relation to our progress. (Haidt, 2006)

In a sense, we move the goalposts for ourselves. Whenever we achieve a challenging goal we thought would make a difference in our lives, the satisfaction is short-lived, as we start entertaining what even better achievement we could reach. On this, Tibor Scitovsky said, in his book The Joyless Economy:

In man's striving for his various goals in life, being on the way to those goals and struggling to achieve them are more satisfying than is the actual attainment of the goals. The attainment of a goal seems, when the moment of triumph is over, almost like a let-down. Few sit back to enjoy it; in fact, most people seek a further goal to strive for, presumably because they prefer the process of striving toward a goal to the passive state of having achieved one. - Scitovsky (1976)

Böll’s story of the fisherman and the businessman has a tragicomic aspect to it. On the comic side, we appreciate the seemingly reasonable sensibility of the happy fisherman whose answers shatter the businessman's confidence in his recipe for a good life. While the fisherman is enjoying life as it is now, the businessman only proposes a long series of challenging and tiresome steps to eventually enjoy the same rest on the seaside.

The tragic aspect of the story is that we are wired to behave like the businessman: to aim ever higher. A missing aspect of the story is that, along the way, we enjoy the journey. We are excited at the idea that we can achieve great things and feel good when we make progress toward our goals. It is because of these good feelings that we do not indulge in the pleasure of staying put and, instead, keep moving forward. Our psychology is designed to push us to achieve the best we can reach because our ancestors were more likely to be those who continuously strove for higher levels of success, rather than simply enjoying life. As a result, we can only look longingly at the happy fisherman as an endearing fictional figure whose carefree lifestyle is outside the realm of our psychology.¹

References

Allen, E.J., Dechow, P.M., Pope, D.G. and Wu, G., 2017. Reference-dependent preferences: Evidence from marathon runners. Management Science, 63(6), pp.1657-1672.

Anderson, A. and Green, E.A., 2018. Personal bests as reference points. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 115(8), pp.1772-1776.

Böll, H., 1963. Anekdote zur senkung der arbeitsmoral. Heinrich B611 Werke, Romane und Erziihlungen, 4, pp.1961-1970.

Haidt, J., 2006. The happiness hypothesis: Putting ancient wisdom and philosophy to the test of modern science. Random House.

Heath, C., Larrick, R.P. and Wu, G., 1999. Goals as reference points. Cognitive psychology, 38(1), pp.79-109.

Kubitz, G. and Page, L., If you can, you must. Information, utility, and loss aversion. Working paper

Scitovsky, T., 1976. The joyless economy: The psychology of human satisfaction. Oxford University Press, USA.

1. In that perspective, a carefree attitude can only persist when there is nothing to care about. It is the case if the fisherman has de facto no prospect of succeeding along the path suggested by the businessman.