The Small BIG: Small Changes That Spark Big Influence (9 page)

E
very day we see persuasive messages appealing to our sense of obligation and moral responsibility to other people. Commercials tell us we owe it to our families to buy life insurance. Politicians tell us we owe it to our fellow citizens to buy products produced domestically. Environmentalists tell us we owe it to future generations to conserve the world’s natural resources. And our conscience tells us we owe it to our parents to take care of them as they get older after all they’ve done for us. It’s clear that we owe it to a lot of different people to do the right things in life, but is there one person out there whom we might owe it to the most?

How about your future self?

Researchers Christopher Bryan and Hal Hershfield explored the hypothesis that people can be persuaded to engage in behaviors that are beneficial to themselves in the long-term (even if they are seemingly costly in the short-term) by appealing to their sense of moral responsibility to the future version of themselves.

Considering that most people are in danger of not saving enough to ensure a financially secure future, the specific behavior that Bryan and Hershfield examined was saving money for retirement. To test their ideas, the researchers studied nearly 200 staff members of a university who had not been contributing much to their retirement plans.

All staff members enrolled in the study were sent a message reminding them of the importance of saving for retirement and strongly encouraging them to increase their savings rate. However, the last paragraph of the message differed significantly depending on which group the staff members were randomly assigned to.

For example, in the “standard future self-interest” condition, participants read, “We urge you to consider your long-term interests and to start saving more now. After all, your long-term well-being is at stake. Your decisions now will determine how much money is available to you when you retire.”

In the “obligation to future self” condition, participants read, “We urge you to consider the responsibility you have to yourself in retirement and to start saving more now. After all, your ‘future self’ is completely dependent on you. Your decisions now will determine how much financial security your future self can count on.”

Two weeks later, the researchers asked the university benefits office to report how much participants changed their retirement plan savings rate after they viewed the message. Those who received the “obligation to future self” message increased their savings rate by 0.85 percent more than those who received the “standard future self-interest” message. At first glance this doesn’t seem that much of a difference, but consider the results if a 30-year-old man earning the national median salary of $45,485 per year increases his standard 5 percent contribution to 5.85 percent. Assuming he gets no raises over his lifetime (an extremely conservative estimate), on retirement at 65 years of age that small increase will have accrued an extra $68,797 of savings. Another way of looking at it is that the man in this example can retire roughly one and a half years earlier simply because of his response to the owe-it-to-yourself persuasive message!

This research demonstrates how appealing to people’s moral responsibility to the future version of themselves can be a powerful influence strategy. However, it is important to note that the “obligation to future self” message didn’t work for everyone. It turns out that people vary somewhat on how close they feel to their future selves. That is, the researchers found that those who felt little connection to their future selves were equally persuaded by both messages. Does this mean that when encouraging people to make financial plans for the future, you’ll have to somehow identify those people who have a particular closeness to their future selves and segment your message accordingly? Actually, no. Although this strategy didn’t work for everyone, the fact that the “obligation to future self” message fared no worse than the “standard future self-interest” message for those who didn’t feel connected to their future selves suggests that the former strategy is probably the best overall strategy to employ.

The idea that big differences in retirement savings can result from the small act of asking people to consider their moral obligation to their future selves should appeal to financial advisers, HR managers, and policy makers alike. But is there an even more effective way to focus people’s attention on the importance of considering their future selves? It turns out there is—show them a photo of what they likely will look like in the future.

In the studies, this time conducted by Hal Hershfield and six other researchers, participants first uploaded photographs of themselves a few weeks prior to the study. When the study started they were asked to indicate how much they would like to contribute to their retirement fund using an on-screen slider that controlled their level of contribution. Half entered their contributions on a screen that displayed the “current” photograph that the participant had uploaded. However, the other half saw an “age-progressed” photo portraying how they would likely look at the age of 70. This small change made a huge difference. Participants in the “future self” condition allocated an average of 6.2 percent of their earnings to their savings plan compared to an average of 4.4 percent by those in the “current self” condition. That’s more than a 40 percent difference in savings driven by participants’ contact with their future selves via the age-progressed photo.

The implications are clear. Any communicator challenged with changing the behaviors of someone who won’t experience the benefit of those changes for a considerable time should not only point out the obligation they have to their future self but also illustrate what that future self will look like. For example, a doctor wishing to persuade a patient to give up smoking might run a photograph through a free age-progression app online to highlight how smoking can speed up aging.

But if the opportunity of providing an image of another’s future self proves to be problematic, such as when seeking to persuade lots of people, additional research conducted by Daniel Bartels and Oleg Urminsky suggests an altogether easier approach. Their studies show that a communicator may be able to strengthen people’s sense of connection between their current selves and their future selves by simply reminding them that even though some aspects of their lives will change over time, each person’s core identity—who they really are as a person—will remain the same.

As a result, rather than just employing guilt strategies or complex incentive schemes to reduce, let’s say, overeating or overspending, simply reminding people of their connectedness to their future selves may help them resist temptation and make more farsighted decisions.

You might think that the tactical shifts recommended in this chapter seem too small in scope to work. But, at the very minimum, you owe it to your future self to try out the new tactics and to see if they work for you.

I
n 1919 Walt Disney was fired from his job drawing political cartoons for the
Kansas City Star
newspaper because, according to the paper’s editor, “He wasn’t creative enough.”

In 2012, British biologist Sir John Gurdon’s long and distinguished contribution to physiology and medicine was recognized with a Nobel Prize despite an Eton schoolmaster writing on his report card, “I believe Gurdon has ideas about becoming a scientist; based on his present showing this is quite ridiculous.”

And according to Hollywood folklore, a studio manager at RKO Pictures was reputed to have written off Fred Astaire in an early screen test, saying, “[He] can’t act. Can’t sing. Balding. Can dance a little.”

Happily, these early setbacks weren’t enough to deter each from the goals they had set for themselves. Each went on to achieve amazing things. But sometimes people do get diverted and disengage from their goals—not the big, once-in-a-lifetime, dream factory kind of goals that future Nobel Prize winners and Hollywood icons will aspire to achieve, but smaller yet still important everyday goals, like saving a bit more money, losing some weight, paying off a credit card debt, or reaching this month’s sales quota.

People often need to reengage with a previous goal they have set themselves. Similarly, managers, team supervisors, teachers, and even parents will sometimes need to reconnect and engage their staffs, students, and kids with an earlier objective, too. Traditionally when we set new goals either for ourselves or for others, the received wisdom has been to be very specific about what needs to be achieved. For example, lose two pounds a week, run six miles in 60 minutes, or save $100 every month for next year’s vacation fund. But is this common wisdom really true when we’re persuading ourselves or others to
reengage
with a goal?

Marketing professors Maura Scott and Stephen Nowlis thought that even though it makes intuitive sense for people to create a single, specific number goal for a new objective or endeavor, this may not necessarily be the case when it comes to reengaging with one’s previous goals. Instead, they believed that people would be much more likely to reengage with prior goals if—rather than setting a single, specific number goal (e.g., lose 3 pounds a week)—they set a goal with a high-low range that averaged the same (e.g., lose 2–4 pounds a week).

To test their ideas the researchers set up a series of studies including one that took place in a weight loss club. Members who agreed to participate in the ten-week program first established their weight loss goals for the period and were then assigned to one of two weight loss groups—either a single-number goal group or a high-low range goal group. For example, members wishing to lose 2 pounds in the first week would be given the goal to “lose 2 pounds this week” if they were assigned to the single-number group or given the goal to “lose 1–3 pounds this week” if they were assigned to the high-low range number group.

At the beginning of each week participants would weigh in, establish their weight loss goal for the following week, and then take part in a group session in which they learned about healthy lifestyle practices. At the end of the ten-week period, the researchers measured both the dieters’ performance—in terms of the amount of weight they lost—and willingness to reengage in another ten-week program. Although there wasn’t much difference in terms of weight loss between the groups (during the first three weeks, those in the high-low range group lost an average 2.67 pounds compared to 2.2 pounds in the single-number goal group), the high-low range goal had a huge effect on persuading dieters to reengage and enroll in a further ten-week program. Just over 50 percent of those assigned a single-number weight loss goal enrolled in a future weight loss program, but close to 80 percent of those assigned a high-low range weight loss goal enrolled in further programs, paying a $25 fee to do so.

Diet club leaders and health club managers should take note. Even though the amount of weight lost across the two groups was similar, as any nutritionist will tell you, it is sustained weight loss over time that matters most. Given that a key ingredient to sustainability is helping people to reconnect to their goals over time, this could be one small change that you could make that would lead to a big difference. But why?

Previous research has shown that two factors can have an important influence on people when pursuing a goal:
challenge and attainability
. People should feel sufficiently challenged by a goal, because that will contribute to their feeling a sense of accomplishment, but only to the extent that there is a realistic possibility that the goal can be attained. Unlike single-number goals, wherein someone may have to pick a number that is relatively easily attainable, relatively challenging, or a compromise somewhere in between, high-low range goals have the advantage of engaging both these factors. In essence they influence goal reengagement by providing feelings of accomplishment driven by both the attainability and the challenge of the goal.

It is obvious that the subsequent success of Walt Disney, Fred Astaire, and Sir John Gurdon following their initial setbacks wasn’t simply the result of doing something small, like changing the way they set goals for themselves. To become a Nobel Prize winner or a Hollywood icon requires huge sacrifices, hard work and study, and years of dedicated practice to nurture and develop talent. These are all BIG things.

But as we continually show throughout this book, small things matter too.

As this research clearly demonstrates, making a
SMALL
change to the way we set our own and others’ goals can make for BIG differences when it comes to engagement. A teacher, eager to reengage a pupil who recently performed poorly on a spelling bee, might set a high-low range goal of 7–9 correct words out of 10 on tomorrow’s test rather than just aiming for a score of 8. A call center supervisor, keen to encourage and maintain high call volume levels, might experiment with single-number goals on one shift (for example, calling
x
number of customers per day) and high-low range goals on another shift (for example, making
y–z
number of calls per day) and then measure the differences this small change makes. Debt management companies and financial savings firms could find that repayment (and savings) plans are sustained much longer by their customers if they agree to high-low range repayment (savings) goals—for example, having customers pay back (save) $28–$32 a month rather than $30 a month.

A small change in the way people can be reconnected to their goals could have broader policy implications, too. Following a recommendation from the World Health Organization, a number of countries, including the United States of America, the United Kingdom, and Germany, have adopted 5 A Day programs that encourage citizens to consume five portions of fruit and vegetables each day. Many of these programs have measured only mixed success for a variety of reasons. This research suggests that making a small change to the 5 A Day stipulation (for example, making it 4–6 portions a day) could serve to reengage those who have aborted previous attempts to achieve the goal.