Quitting (previously published as Mastering the Art of Quitting) (3 page)

The human brain is wired to respond to the near win
because when it comes to physical skills, the near win is actually a good predictor of success. Say you're trying to hunt down an animal for food, shoot a target, or hit a baseball—any physical activity that involves real skill and expertise—and you almost succeed. The near win signals that you're getting closer to achieving your goal—that if you just hone your skills a little bit more, you're very likely to succeed. In academic pursuits, the near win—falling just short of the grade you've set as a goal for yourself—is also reliable. Studying harder and longer the next time will probably do the trick.

Unfortunately, neither human beings nor their brains are uniformly good at figuring when the near win is applicable and when it isn't.
A British study on gambling
took a bunch of ordinary people, matched them up with slot machines, and then measured their brain activity when they played. Winning at the slots, of course, isn't a matter of skill at all, but the researchers found that players and their brains responded to the near win exactly as they would when skill was actually involved. The pleasure and reward parts of their brains lit up for a near win almost as brightly as when they actually won money. Moreover, the near win was enough to keep them playing, even though they'd actually lost money and what they perceived as a near win was totally useless as a predictor of a real win. It didn't matter. Not surprisingly, the near win plays a big part in the lives of those who become compulsive gamblers.

But we don't have to be playing the slots to be affected by the near win. Even when it doesn't apply to the situation we're in, the near win reinforces our positive beliefs and kicks up our capacity for wishful thinking. It often results in our staying in relationships and situations long past their expiration date, even when it's obvious to the rest of the world that we're very unlikely to succeed. Our belief in persistence encourages us to reframe what's actually a miss as a near win.

In Jennifer's story, the near win at work comes into play when she tries new ways of eliciting her boss' praise and begins to read any response that isn't downright dismissive as a sign that she's getting closer to winning him over. Just the word
okay
, instead of a withering criticism, is enough to make her feel she's making progress.

The near win influences us not just because of the wiring in our brains but also because of the cultural injunctions against quitting. If letting go of a goal isn't an option, we're that much more open to its seductions, whether it's in the realm of business, relationship, or love. Understanding the power of this particular habit of mind and identifying our individual tendency to recast a loss as a near win are important first steps on the way to the perspective we need to be able to quit.

Listening to Anecdote

When you're deciding whether something is likely to happen to you or whether one event is likely to lead to another, you're going to sit down, apply the rules of logic, and make your most considered decision, right? Actually not. What's much more likely is that your brain will work from the examples or anecdotes that spring most readily to mind, and you'll decide on that basis.

This psychological phenomenon, with the tongue-twisting name
availability heuristic
, is another mental proclivity
that gives the myth of persistence a big boost. This kind of thinking—drawing from the most available and vivid example—was originally extremely valuable to human survival. Say you're a Paleolithic
caribou hunter and you've been taking the shortest route to the lake where the deer gather. Then you hear that three men have been attacked by bears on this very same route. The information lets you connect the dots—short route equals bears equals danger—and you decide instead to take a longer route that may make hunting harder but will allow you to live longer. Similarly, without knowing anything about internal temperatures or trichinosis, many ancient cultures and religions heeded the anecdotes about people dying after eating pork and prohibited it as a food.

Alas, in today's world, the power of anecdote to persuade isn't universally beneficial. The easy availability of an example—the lottery winners we see on television and read about, the people who persisted beyond all odds and achieved lofty goals as showcased on talk shows—can have us believing, “Why not me?” even if there's absolutely no evidence at all that it
will
be you. In a media-saturated world, hearing some examples over and over can have us connecting the dots when there aren't any to connect. It has us believing that some things—both good and bad—are more probable than they really are. That's true both for the persistence-equals-success stories and everything else.

For example, take the media attention focused on dangers such as school shootings and shark attacks. As a result of this attention, people, no matter how smart they are, attribute greater likelihood to these events simply because the examples are more easily pulled up out of memory. The more vivid or emotionally compelling the example, the more likely it will be readily available.

To prove the point,
psychologist Scott Plous
asked subjects whether a person was more likely to be killed by falling airplane parts or by a shark attack. Think a minute, and answer it yourself.

Because shark attacks get more publicity, most people will answer “shark attack,” even though you're thirty times more likely to die from pieces of aircraft falling from the sky—an unlikely event, to be sure, but a better bet than a shark attack. That's the availability heuristic at work.

Our cultural assumptions about persistence—and the many examples the media extols and delivers in the form of story—make us especially vulnerable to the power the anecdote has over our thinking. There's nothing wrong with inspiration, of course, and stories of persistence can and do inspire people. The problem is that when our decisions are being shaped by the first things that come to mind, we're not likely to be asking the right questions. And the right question, for sure, isn't usually, “Why not me?”

The availability heuristic, alas, makes us lousy at predicting success or anything else, for that matter. Taking stock of how we chose to persist in an effort—while keeping the availability heuristic in mind—is one important way of keeping the hounds of persistence at bay and beginning to take an honest look at whether quitting is what we need to do.

The Power of Intermittent Reinforcement

Unwarranted persistence can also be fed by what's called
intermittent reinforcement
, and if the phrase reminds you of something you once heard in Psych 101, then you've got a damn good memory. Intermittent reinforcement is relevant because it turns out that what happens to rats also happens to human beings. (And to refresh your memory, the guy who did the work was B. F. Skinner.)

Picture three hungry rats in three separate cages, each of which has a lever. In the first cage, the rat pushes the lever and gets a pellet of food every time. It doesn't take the rat long to realize that the lever is a reliable source of food, and the creature is free to do whatever rats do, like run the wheel, dig up sawdust, and the like. The rat is a happy camper because it knows where its food is coming from.

In the third cage, though, the rat pushes the lever and nothing happens. It pushes again and again, and nothing happens. Because there's no food reward, the rat gives up on the lever and goes about its business looking for food.

The rat in the second cage, though, is in real trouble. When it hits the lever, sometimes it gets a pellet and sometimes it doesn't. Even for a rat, hope springs eternal and the animal becomes fixated on the lever, continuing to push, frustrated and rewarded by turns. The intermittent reinforcement keeps the rat parked by the lever day and night. In other words, of the three rats, the rat whose lever delivered only some of the time ends up being the most persistent.

There's no doubt that intermittent reinforcement was useful at times in human history, especially when it came to hunting, fishing, and foraging. Getting what you needed at least some of the time reinforced the persistence you needed to survive. Alas, when applied to other situations, intermittent reinforcement may not be such a good thing. That's certainly true of the unattainable goal.

Say your goal is to try to make the line of communication between you and someone else more open and responsive. (You can fill in parent, sibling, spouse, lover, friend, colleague, or boss as you wish. You can also switch the “he” in the story to “she.”) You have numerous heart-to-hearts and a couple of screaming matches, and every time, you explain to the person that he isn't empathetic enough or listening to what you have to say. Nothing about his behavior changes, and you're actually considering packing it in when, suddenly out of nowhere, he opens up to you. Miracle of miracles, he's actually listening and every hesitation you had about staying in the relationship flies out of your head.

Life goes on and so does he—and his behavior goes back to what it was before. You repeat the serious conversations and the screaming matches, and—lo and behold—he's suddenly open, understanding, and attentive. Again, you decide to persist.

That's intermittent reinforcement. Perhaps the classic example of intermittent reinforcement in a relationship was played out between Carrie Bradshaw and Mr. Big on
Sex in the City
for six seasons.

But intermittent reinforcement works outside the realm of relationship too. Temporary resolutions to a problem blocking a goal can reinforce unwarranted tenacity the same way.

For example, Julie's passion was making jewelry, and she'd always dreamed of being her own boss and creating a life in which she did what she loved. She saved her money and went into business by subleasing space in a store in New Jersey. “To turn a profit,” she says, “I had to sell three thousand dollars' worth of jewelry a week at retail if I were open six days a week. Most weeks, I didn't make my goal, but now and again—say, one week out of four—I would actually meet it or exceed it. That kept me thinking that I was just a step or two from success. I stayed on the merry-go-round for two years, depleting most of my savings, until I finally faced the music.”

Intermittent reinforcement feeds persistence even when it isn't connected to any real progress that might bring a goal to fruition and keeps the individual from adopting new behaviors that might help him or her to disengage. It's another reason why the reliance on tenacity alone isn't a good idea, and why we need to step back and ask ourselves whether our habits of mind are actually driving the bus.

Trapped in the Escalation of Commitment

There's some dispute about who actually said, “When the going gets tough, the tough get going,” but it turns out to be true in unexpected ways. In the broader culture, the saying summons up noble persistence—think D-day and the beaches of Normandy or Rocky bounding up those steps—but the truth is something else entirely.
Escalation of commitment
, as it's called, is a favorite of researchers for reasons that will soon be clear. In a nutshell, scientists have found that people actually increase their commitment to a goal when it's foundering or even unsalvageable and they do it without prompting or even a prayer to Saint Jude, the patron saint of lost causes.

The escalation of commitment is fascinating for a variety of reasons. First, it's universal and operates in every culture around the globe, no matter how different the cultures. Second, being smart or well educated doesn't protect you from falling into the trap of
escalation. Third, everyone except the one redoubling his or her efforts knows that the escalation is irrational. And finally, escalation of commitment tells us a lot about the human beings and their brains, motivations, and actions.

Needless to say, the near win, the availability heuristic, and intermittent reinforcement can all contribute to the escalation of commitment. But there are other reasons too—biases in thinking, various innate or social behaviors, and, of course, the onus on quitting—that make us amp up the volume even when failure is in plain sight.

One major contributor to the phenomenon is basic to human nature: our inability to assess ourselves and our talents realistically. While self-help books and television shows tend to focus on our collective lack of self-esteem, most of us actually have oversized visions of how skilled or talented we are compared with others. Again, at some point in human history, this bias in thinking probably served a purpose—giving our Paleolithic forebear the extra oomph and self-confidence to become the leader the clan needed or the psychological edge that pushed him to hunt better than his peers. Nowadays, though, it's more like a set of blinders than not.

The
above-average effect
describes how, when people are asked to measure their capacities against those of their peers, the majority will rate themselves as above average. This appraisal holds true across many categories, including driving skills, athletic prowess, health, managerial ability, and character traits like kindness and generosity. Most famously, one enormous study of a million high school students by the College Board showed that 70 percent of them rated themselves as above average in leadership abilities! Even more astonishing, when asked to rate their ability to get along with others, each person rated his or her ability as at least average while 60 percent awarded themselves the top tenth percentile and a full 25 percent placed themselves in the first percentile! Put another way, of one million people, only 15 percent judged their ability as average.

Bluntly put, we may fall into the escalation trap because we are bad judges of whether our skills are good enough to achieve the goal or even whether they're a good fit. If we're in a competitive
situation, we're more likely to overstate our abilities and underestimate those of the competition.
We tend to be overconfident
.