Scientific Research into Habits and Goals
I’m working on a physics PhD, and I’ve always been a scientifically-minded person.
So when I started working on habit forming software, and reading about goal setting, I naturally turned to science journals for some concrete evidence about the statements I had read.
For instance, it is often stated that making your goals specific will make them more likely to get done.
I wondered if there was any evidence of this?
It turns out that [1], if you take a group of students and send them a questionnaire that forces them to think in concrete terms, they will respond in a week or so, on average.
If you send a very similar questionnaire, but one that leads to more abstract thinking, they will procrastinate for 21 days or more.
The abstract task was procrastinated for three times longer than the concrete one!
That is a significant difference.
So, when you hear people saying that Specific goals are better, now you know there’s more to it than just “Yeah, that sounds about right.”
[1] – McCrea, S. M., Liberman, N., Trope, Y., & Sherman , S. J. (2008). Construal level and procrastination. Psychological Science, 19, 1308-131
Available at the McCrea’s webpage.
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