You have made an important decision: become a vegetarian, change jobs or open your own business. All these goals are long-term and will require significant effort from you. Some want to tell the whole world about them, while others, on the contrary, prefer to keep their intentions a secret until they have gone all or at least half the way to their dream. Who is right?
In the West, it is generally accepted that a public announcement of one’s goals motivates a person to work in the right direction. In Russia, the majority, including because of superstition, tries to keep important decisions secret, especially if their fate is still in question. It turns out that the second approach is justified.
“If you want to make God laugh, tell him about your plans.” If you want to jeopardize success, tell others about your goals, psychologist Peter Gollwitzer and his colleagues at New York University came to this conclusion. Students of the Faculty of Law took part in their study.
They had to accept or reject a series of statements about their academic aspirations. For example: “I’m going to make the most of the opportunities that my university offers.” Some students answered anonymously, others discussed the answers with the research organizer. Gollwitzer’s goal was to compare two groups: those who hid and those who made their intentions public.
Then the psychologists decided to test how students are ready to really invest in their education. They turned to them for help in analyzing 20 of the most complex criminal cases. Students could work at any pace and were also allowed to leave the project at any time.
It turned out that although all students confirmed their readiness to devote themselves entirely to jurisprudence, only those who did not loudly declare their plans were really ready to work with maximum efficiency and achieve results. The rest did not show genuine enthusiasm and left the project.
Peter Gollwitzer believes that this is due to a sense of one’s own identity and integrity. Wishing to appear before others in the best light, some students “finished” their own image: “I am a lawyer, I am a lawyer.”
Stories that they were bound to become excellent lawyers led students to believe that they were already qualified professionals.
The inflated self-image had a bad effect on their performance.
In another experiment, students were asked to make a list of three specific actions they would take to become successful lawyers. It usually included a promise to read specialized literature. As in the previous study, some students shared their plans, while others kept them secret.
After that, a test was carried out. The students were shown five photographs of various sizes of Supreme Court lawyers and were asked the question: “How do you rate your own professionalism in the field of law?” The respondent had to choose one of five photographs. So he demonstrated an automatic, unconscious mechanism of self-esteem: the larger the photograph, the more accomplished a professional he felt.
In support of Gollwitzer’s suggestion, those students who announced their plans to read specialized literature chose larger images of their role models. Simply voicing the intention to become a good lawyer gave the students a sense of their own worth. And this inflated vision of themselves further undermined their desire to work hard.
“I’m starting to run on Monday”, “I decided to go on a diet”, “I will soon launch a new blog …” – when you want to publish a similar status on the Web or announce your decision to friends, think about it: perhaps it is because of these “announcements” that the plans and not destined to come true. On the other hand, failure can always be attributed to this.