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Why and How Fresh Starts Motivate Goal Pursuit--And When They Backfire University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations 2015 Putting Your Past Behind You: Why and How Fresh Starts Motivate Goal Pursuit--and When They Backfire Hengchen Dai University of Pennsylvania, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations Part of the Organizational Behavior and Theory Commons, and the Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons Recommended Citation Dai, Hengchen, "Putting Your Past Behind You: Why and How Fresh Starts Motivate Goal Pursuit--and When They Backfire" (2015). Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations. 1035. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/1035 This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/1035 For more information, please contact [email protected]. Putting Your Past Behind You: Why and How Fresh Starts Motivate Goal Pursuit-- and When They Backfire Abstract People often fail to exercise the self-control required to tackle their goals and improve their performance. However, many feel that we have opportunities throughout our lives to start fresh with a clean slate (e.g., around New Year's Day, after a Catholic confession). Although the notion of "fresh starts" has long been endorsed by our culture, researchers have not systematically explored the implications of fresh starts for people's motivation to exert effort in goal-directed activities. Across three chapters, I examine (a) how and why fresh starts affect individuals' ability to exert the self-control needed to achieve their aspirations and (b) when fresh starts may adversely influence individuals' motivation to improve their performance. In Chapter 1, three archival field studies demonstrate that people engage in aspirational behaviors (e.g., exercising, creating a goal commitment contract) more frequently at the start of new time periods that are initiated by temporal landmarks (e.g., the beginning of a new week/month/year/school semester, or immediately following a holiday, a school break, or a birthday). In Chapter 2, five laboratory studies show that meaningful temporal landmarks--dates imbued with meaning due to their identity-relevance or rarity-- are more likely to spur goal pursuit than (a) ordinary days or (b) objectively identical but psychologically less meaningful landmarks. Further, I provide evidence for one mechanism underlying these findings: temporal landmarks (particularly meaningful landmarks) relegate past imperfections to a previous period, making the current self feel more capable of pursuing aspirations. Chapter 3 investigates the impact on individuals' future performance of tracking their performance without incorporating records of their past performance (a phenomenon I refer to as a performance reset). I propose that when individuals believe their past performance was poor, a performance reset will improve their performance by boosting self- efficacy and commitment. However, I expect resets to hurt performance by decreasing commitment without increasing self-efficacy when individuals believe their past performance was strong. One archival field study and four laboratory experiments support this hypothesized relationship between performance resets, past performance, and future performance; these studies also provide preliminary evidence that self-efficacy mediates thiselationship. r Chapter 4 discusses directions for future research. Degree Type Dissertation Degree Name Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Graduate Group Operations & Information Management First Advisor Katherine L. Milkman Keywords Fresh Starts, Goals, Mental Accounting, Motivation, Performance Management Subject Categories Organizational Behavior and Theory | Social and Behavioral Sciences This dissertation is available at ScholarlyCommons: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/1035 PUTTING YOUR PAST BEHIND YOU: WHY AND HOW FRESH STARTS MOTIVATE GOAL PURSUIT—AND WHEN THEY BACKFIRE Hengchen Dai A DISSERTATION in Operations and Information Management For the Graduate Group in Managerial Science and Applied Economics Presented to the Faculties of the University of Pennsylvania in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2015 Supervisor of Dissertation Signature _________________ Katherine L. Milkman, Assistant Professor of Operations and Information Management Graduate Group Chairperson Signature _________________ Eric T. Bradlow, Professor of Marketing, Statistics, and Education Dissertation Committee Maurice E. Schweitzer, Professor of Operations and Information Management Katherine Klein, Professor of Management David A. Hofmann, Professor of Organizational Behavior/Strategy, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill ii DEDICATION This dissertation is dedicated to my loving parents: Bendong Dai and Zhengling Hu iii ACKNOWLEDGMENT I would firstly like to express my deepest gratitude to my advisor, Katy Milkman, for her guidance, support, and advice throughout my doctoral program. She has always been there for me. I am deeply grateful for feedback from Maurice Schweitzer, Dave Hofmann, Katherine Klein, Brad Staats, Jason Riis, Etan Green, Alex Rees-Jones, Uri Simonsohn, Joe Simmons, Shane Jensen, Katie Shonk, and Lynn Selhat. I have also received invaluable help from doctoral students at Wharton and would like to particularly thank Emma Levine, Theresa Kelly, and Berkeley Dietvorst. In addition, I would like to thank my research assistants, Ola Abou-khsaiwan, Sarah Beckoff, Benjamin Kirby, Daniel Miller, Alex Rogala, Gregory Stulpin, and Elliot Tusk. I want to particularly thank Hannah Victor, Vincent Conley, Sargent Shriver, and the Wharton Behavioral Lab for their assistance with my dissertation. Also, I want to thank stickK for providing data. I appreciate the financial support from the Wharton Dean’s Research Fund, the Operations and Information Management Department, the Wharton Behavioral Lab, the Wharton Risk Center Russell Ackoff Doctoral Student Fellowship, and the Center for Health Incentives and Behavioral Economics at the University of Pennsylvania. Finally, I would like to thank my family and friends for their unwavering moral support. Special thanks go to my husband, Sheng Xu, for his constant love, support, and encouragement, which helped me go through each and every hard time during the years that we have been together. iv ABSTRACT PUTTING YOUR PAST BEHIND YOU: WHY AND HOW FRESH STARTS MOTIVATE GOAL PURSUIT—AND WHEN THEY BACKFIRE Hengchen Dai Katherine L. Milkman People often fail to exercise the self-control required to tackle their goals and improve their performance. However, many feel that we have opportunities throughout our lives to start fresh with a clean slate (e.g., around New Year’s Day, after a Catholic confession). Although the notion of “fresh starts” has long been endorsed by our culture, researchers have not systematically explored the implications of fresh starts for people’s motivation to exert effort in goal-directed activities. Across three chapters, I examine (a) how and why fresh starts affect individuals’ ability to exert the self-control needed to achieve their aspirations and (b) when fresh starts may adversely influence individuals’ motivation to improve their performance. In Chapter 1, three archival field studies demonstrate that people engage in aspirational behaviors (e.g., exercising, creating a goal commitment contract) more frequently at the start of new time periods that are initiated by temporal landmarks (e.g., the beginning of a new week/month/year/school semester, or immediately following a holiday, a school break, or a birthday). In Chapter 2, five laboratory studies show that meaningful temporal landmarks—dates imbued with meaning due to their identity- relevance or rarity—are more likely to spur goal pursuit than (a) ordinary days or (b) objectively identical but psychologically less meaningful landmarks. Further, I provide v evidence for one mechanism underlying these findings: temporal landmarks (particularly meaningful landmarks) relegate past imperfections to a previous period, making the current self feel more capable of pursuing aspirations. Chapter 3 investigates the impact on individuals’ future performance of tracking their performance without incorporating records of their past performance (a phenomenon I refer to as a performance reset). I propose that when individuals believe their past performance was poor, a performance reset will improve their performance by boosting self-efficacy and commitment. However, I expect resets to hurt performance by decreasing commitment without increasing self-efficacy when individuals believe their past performance was strong. One archival field study and four laboratory experiments support this hypothesized relationship between performance resets, past performance, and future performance; these studies also provide preliminary evidence that self-efficacy mediates this relationship. Chapter 4 discusses directions for future research. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS DEDICATION..................................................................................................................................II ACKNOWLEDGMENT ........................................................................................................... III ABSTRACT ............................................................................................................................. IV LIST OF TABLES.........................................................................................................................VII
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