Quitting (previously published as Mastering the Art of Quitting) (12 page)

In one
visual-cliff experiment conducted by James F. Sorce and others
, mothers were instructed to pose with either a happy face or a frightened one. None of the babies crossed the cliff when they saw fear on their mothers' faces, and most of them actually retreated to where they'd started. Next, the mothers posed with either an interested expression or an angry one. While most of the babies crossed the cliff on cue with the interested expression, only two of the eighteen babies ventured forth when their mothers' faces looked angry. When mothers looked sad, only one-third of the babies crossed. Keep in mind that the expression of fearfulness stopped
every
infant.

As infants and children, we all learn how to regulate our emotions and direct our behaviors through our connections to our primary caregivers. It all begins in the nursery. That's why other studies have argued that an infant's ability to explore and open up his or her horizons, both literally and figuratively, is connected to how securely (or insecurely) attached the child is, and that this disposition would stay constant through adulthood.

Elliot and Ries hypothesized
that securely attached adults would see achievement goals as a positive challenge that would make them feel competent. Moreover, the researchers argued that these adults would be able to respond with relative equanimity to the possibility of failing at the task. Their insecurely attached counterparts, on the other hand, would regard an achievement goal as a possible threat, given the possibility of failure, and would “self-protectively seek to avoid incompetence,” as the researchers put it. In their first experiment, they measured attachment in romantic
relationships; 50 percent of the participants identified themselves as securely attached, 30 percent as avoidant, and 20 percent as anxious/ambivalent. The participants then completed an achievement goal questionnaire. By presenting statements with which the subjects had to disagree or agree, the questionnaire assessed the participants' approach or avoidant stances. For example, “It was important for me to understand the content of the course as thoroughly as possible” (mastery-approach); “It's important for me to do well compared to others in this class” (performance-approach); “I just want to avoid doing poorly in this course” (performance-avoidance). The participants also made a list of eight personal goals.

What the researchers found in this and other subsequent experiments was that securely attached people needed high achievement, had a low fear of failure, and had strong personal-approach goals and mastery-approach goals. Put plainly, they were highly motivated to expand in the areas of relationship, skill, and achievement. In contrast, insecurely attached participants had a low need for achievement and a high fear of failure; their goals were largely avoidant in both the areas of mastery and performance. One point, though, should be emphasized: while both participants who identified themselves as anxious/ambivalent and those who were avoidant shared a fear of failure, the anxious/ambivalent used avoidance goals, but the avoidant group did not. The category of anxious/ambivalent is important when it comes to the talent for quitting: “Anxious attachment undermines optimal achievement motivation because it impels individuals to view achievement tasks in terms of losses and to feel a heightened need to do well, both of which produce a defensive focus on avoiding negative outcomes.”

People with the anxious/ambivalent stance have a particular problem. While they're inclined to focus on failure, they also want to succeed. It sounds like a contradiction, but then again, ambivalence by definition is contradictory. These people have a great deal of difficulty quitting anything, especially relationships. They are preoccupied with relationships, suffer from highs and lows in feeling, and are unable to quit, no matter what. People with avoidant
attachment—as the term implies—fear intimacy and, more than anything else, suffer from an inability to engage.

An in-depth analysis by Philip R. Shaver and Mario Mikulincer
sheds even more light on how these attachment models connect to the work of goal engagement and the stress involved with changing course. The problem is clear: The ability to quit artfully requires the regulation of thought and emotion first, which then leads to motivational and behavior change and the formulation of new goals. Securely attached people are good at regulating their emotions when they are distressed. They can get angry without being hostile and are quick to adopt constructive goals aimed at repairing a relationship under stress. They are open on a cognitive level, too, and don't have to rely on distortion to feel good about themselves.

Anxiously attached individuals use strategies that tend to exacerbate, rather than relieve, the effect of stressful events; they ruminate and thus, by focusing on the negative emotion, find themselves more deeply embroiled in it. The same thing happens on a cognitive level when they try but fail to suppress intrusive thoughts. People with avoidant attachment distance themselves from stress consciously—they react to threats by inflating their positive views of themselves—but they also cut themselves off emotionally. By armoring themselves in this way, they also lose access to all the positive feelings and connections that might actually help them cope. To paraphrase Shaver and Mikulincer, the strategy has a very high price and leaves them deprived of and without access to positive cues in situations that might actually get them through the crisis by making them feel better. Needless to say, this strategy does nothing to resolve the turmoil they feel.

How those initial childhood attachments affect our abilities to persevere
and
to quit makes perfect sense. Securely attached individuals are grounded and more capable of managing emotion and seeking support when an endeavor begins to falter or even fail. Their insecurely attached counterparts, on the other hand, are mostly motivated by the negative. The ambivalently or anxiously attached who want nothing more than
not
to fail—whether that's
in a relationship or in some other endeavor—have the least talent for quitting.

That's exactly what
a study by Heather C. Lench and Linda J. Levine
found. The researchers gave participants three sets of seven anagrams to be solved in a specific amount of time; the first set of seven was unsolvable. Since it was a timed test, you would get better results if you didn't use up the time trying to work on the first one; in addition, since you couldn't skip an anagram or go back, you had to fully disengage in order to move forward.

Just as the researchers hypothesized, people who identified themselves as being motivated by approach goals stopped their efforts on the first set when they realized persistence wouldn't pay off. But those with avoidance goals not only worked longer at this frustrating and hopeless exercise, but also stayed stuck as the approach group moved forward and exhibited more intense and enduring emotional distress.

In a second study, rather than rely on the self-report of the participants, the researchers primed the participants to fall into one of the two categories. The approach group was told the test was “a measure of your strengths in verbal intelligence” and was told to “try to attain success”; the avoidance group was told that the test was a measure of “your weaknesses in verbal intelligence” and was instructed to try to “avoid failure.” Dealing with the first unsolvable anagram set, as expected, left all the participants with negative emotions, but those who had been primed for an avoidance approach had more negative emotion; in fact, the angrier the participants got, the greater the level of persistence.

“Ironically,” the authors explain, “their focus on avoiding
negative outcomes was associated with an inability to recognize that failure was inevitable and proceed to the next anagram.” Lench and Levine suggest that people with approach goals have more cognitive flexibility and may generate more alternative strategies for achieving a goal than those focused on simply avoiding a negative outcome:
“Counterintuitively, people who focused on the potential failure
of goals were less likely to recognize failure.”

This avoidant focus—combined with the other biases in thinking we all have, including the sunk-cost fallacy and how a goal becomes more valuable once it's unattainable—makes it clear that sometimes persistence is only the path of least resistance. It's precisely why the art of quitting needs to be mastered. No matter what you've been told, if your impulse is always to stick it out, you're going to need an alternative at hand.

Fear of Failure

Spend a moment thinking about your own upbringing and your way of relating to others—are you securely or insecurely attached?—and the role that fear of failure, or failure itself, has played in your life. Two of America's most cherished cultural tropes are that failure is often a necessary stepping-stone to success and that the lessons imparted by failure are often key to an individual's achievement. Popular thinking often casts fear of failure as a motivator too. It purportedly encourages the student to study those extra hours, the worker to try harder to please the boss, and the athlete to keep pumping iron. These cultural tropes, alas, are largely false and oversimplified at best, as we'll explain. We've already described how fear of failure, rather than being a motivator, is closely tied to choosing avoidance goals as well as to insecure models of attachment.

A fascinating study by Elliot and Thrash
investigated the fear of failure; they posited that fear of failure was transmitted from parent to child and that the mediator was the parents' use of love withdrawal in socialization. As the authors point out, it's not
“failure per se that is feared
and avoided, but the shame that accompanies failure.” As an emotion, shame eats away at the whole construct of self, making the person feel unworthy of love and worthless. Fear of failure, the authors write, causes the individual to “experience anxiety prior to and during task engagement and seek to protect the self from failure by escaping the situation physically (quitting) or mentally (withdrawing effort) or by pushing hard to succeed (in order to avoid failure).”
The kind of quitting the culture disdains accounts for the first two of the three possible responses to fear of failure. Only the third response, the most unlikely possibility, supports the cultural trope. We'll argue later that it's not failure but the mastery of the art of quitting that paves the way to new and fulfilling goals and achievement.

Elliot and Thrash posited that parents' own fear of failure would lead them to respond to their children's mistakes, omissions, and failures in ways that taught their offspring that failure was to be avoided at all costs. The researchers specifically focused on one parenting practice, that of love withdrawal. The threat of love withdrawal, especially with small children, can be very subtle, communicated by a cold stare or a stony face, physically turning away from the child, removing the child from the room, or threatening to remove him. (If you think about it, the traditional time-out, which is used by countless parents as a form of discipline, could, if handled in a specific way, also feel like love withdrawal to a child.) Notably, the researchers do not believe that most parents adopted love withdrawal as a conscious strategy:
“Most who use it are simply
responding to their children in a reactive manner out of their own deeply engrained self-evaluative processes.”

The authors found that both a mother's fear of failure and her love withdrawal were directly related to her college-age children's fear of failure. Both fathers' and mothers' fear of failure were predictors of the adoption of avoidance goals and, in the case of fathers, predicted that their children wouldn't adopt mastery goals. Can aversive motivation be passed from one generation to another? Elliot and Thrash think it can be. Withdrawing love or threatening that it might be withdrawn may not be the only behavior that inculcates avoidance goals and a fear of failure. Other parenting styles—such as authoritarian or controlling behaviors—also directly affect the ability to disengage, as we'll see in the perspective offered by the work being done on what's called active and state orientations.

So let's take fear of failure off the shelf as a motivation for achievement. If you attribute your persistence to a fear of failure, it's time to reevaluate.

The Cost of Avoidance

While all of us will certainly have, at any given point in our lives, a mixture of approach and avoidance goals, the focus on avoidance affects your sense of well-being (SWB) in literal wa
ys. For example,
in a study of patients in therapy
, Andrew J. Elliot and Marcy A. Church showed that patients who entered therapy with avoidance goals didn't experience as great an increase in well-being as those with approach goals, and felt that both the therapist and the therapeutic experience were less effective. Keep in mind that the actual goals may be the same, but the way they are framed—in terms of approach and avoidance—makes the difference.
Some examples from the study make the difference clear
:

• •
  “To understand myself and my feelings” versus “To stop being confused about my feelings”
  
• •
  “To have closer relationships with my friends” versus “To avoid feeling alone and isolated”
  
• •
  “To be more stable and happy” versus “To avoid becoming depressed”
  

Take a moment to think about how you frame your goals when you set them and how you tend to think about them when you decide whether to quit or keep going. Is it your habit to think that “If I do X, Y won't happen”? Or do you usually think “If I do X, Y will happen”?

In real life, what looks to be a persistent stance from the outside may be motivated by avoidance. People who grow up in unstable families with constant friction or fighting, an alcoholic parent, or some other form of dysfunction often adopt avoidant strategies unconsciously to stay out of the fray.