brazil84 comments on New year's resolutions: Things worth considering for next year - Less Wrong

5 Post author: Elo 07 December 2015 12:09AM

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Comment author: brazil84 07 December 2015 03:06:59PM *  0 points [-]

What we're really talking about is the balance of the two sides.

Given that: sometimes goal sharing will be bad sometimes goal sharing will be good

I am suggesting that the balance falls on a mix of: 1. mostly good 2. you make what you want out of it and there is no automatic win-state.

So it sounds like you are saying that, generally speaking, goal sharing is not counter-productive and is in fact beneficial. Is that right?

I am pretty sure we can't get much further on convincing one another of a different state of balance... Especially without more evidence either way.

Well what is the evidence which supports your position?

Comment author: Elo 07 December 2015 10:23:00PM -1 points [-]

goal sharing... is in fact beneficial.

yes.

https://www.ted.com/talks/derek_sivers_keep_your_goals_to_yourself/transcript?language=en#t-141000

At the end of the video: that link takes you to the timestamp. (its pretty much what I said above)

I have to admit I only read the first few paragraphs of the transcript earlier and only now went through the entire thing. Looks like your source agrees with me.

it depends entirely on the circumstances of your sharing your goals and the atmosphere in which you do it as well as how you treat the events surrounding sharing your goals.

I'd encourage a from first principles approach. where my early reasoning encompassed your initial ideas and went on to explain why that doesn't explain enough of the observation, and how to take advantage of a different state of the world..

See also: accountability partners. as a thing that happens a lot these days.

Comment author: brazil84 07 December 2015 11:49:07PM 0 points [-]

yes.

Ok.

Looks like your source agrees with me.

Not sure how you get that. Pretty clearly he is saying that in general it's better not to share your goals.

Anyway, please answer my question:

What is the evidence which supports your position?

Comment author: Elo 08 December 2015 12:56:42AM -1 points [-]

I quote from the last 40 seconds of the video:

So if this is true, what can we do? Well, you could resist the temptation to announce your goal. You can delay the gratification that the social acknowledgment brings, and you can understand that your mind mistakes the talking for the doing. But if you do need to talk about something, you can state it in a way that gives you no satisfaction, such as, "I really want to run this marathon, so I need to train five times a week and kick my ass if I don't, okay?"

Sounds like he says there is a way to share goals without getting the negative attributes.

Comment author: brazil84 08 December 2015 02:46:30AM 0 points [-]

Sounds like he says there is a way to share goals without getting the negative attributes.

Right. In other words he is stating that there may be exceptions to the general rule.

By contrast, your position is (apparently) that general rule is that sharing goals is productive and beneficial. And I am again asking you for the evidence which supports your position.

Comment author: Elo 09 December 2015 06:05:13AM *  0 points [-]

http://www.psych.nyu.edu/gollwitzer/09_Gollwitzer_Sheeran_Seifert_Michalski_When_Intentions_.pdf

Our findings are also important from an applied perspective. Given that the effect is limited to committed individuals—those who are most eager to reach their identity goals—an important question is how these individuals might try to escape this effect. Future research might address this question by exploring various routes. First, might it suffice to increase the need for consistency (Cialdini & Trost, 1998) by attending to relevant norms? Or is it also necessary to increase perceived accountability (Lerner & Tetlock, 1999) by considering relevant attributes of the audience (e.g., power) or by specifying one’s behavioral intention in a particular way (e.g., spelling out specific frequency or quality standards vs. stating only that one wants to do one’s best; Locke & Latham, 2002) so that the audience can more easily check on its enactment? Second, might it also be effective for one to furnish a behavioral intention with a plan for how to enact it —that is, to form a corresponding implementation intention (e.g., ‘‘If situation X is encountered, then I will perform the intended behavior Y’’; Gollwitzer, 1999; Gollwitzer & Sheeran, 2006)? As such if-then plans delegate the control of a person’s behavior to situational cues, the intended behavior should be executed when the critical cue arises, whether or not the expression of the behavioral intention had been acknowledged by other people. Third, recent research by Fishbach and her colleagues (Fishbach & Dhar, 2005; Koo & Fishbach, 2008) suggests that interpreting a behavioral performance in terms of indicating commitment to a goal enhances further goal striving, whereas conceiving of a performance in terms of progress toward a goal reduces further goal striving. This implies that a behavioral intention worded to indicate a strong commitment to the identity goal (e.g., ‘‘I want to write a paper to become a great scientist’’) should be less negatively affected by social reality than a behavioral intention that implies progress toward the identity goal (e.g., ‘‘I intend to write a paper, as is done by great scientists’’). Finally, from a goal-systems (Kruglanski et al., 2002) or goalhierarchy (Vallacher & Wegner, 1987) perspective on action control, it stands to reason that any striving for goals—and not just identity goals—that can be attained by various behavioral routes (means) is vulnerable to the negative effects of social reality on the enactment of behavioral intentions. If a person is highly committed to a superordinate goal, and if public recognition of a behavioral intention specifying the use of one route to the goal engenders a sense of goal attainment, then the enactment of this very intention should be hampered. Recent research by Fishbach, Dhar, and Zhang (2006) is in line with this reasoning, showing that success on a subgoal (e.g., eating healthy meals) in the service of a superordinate goal (i.e., keeping in shape) reduces striving for alternative subgoals (e.g., going to the gym).


that's all I got. Future research is needed. But also it matters the environment and how you share.

Comment author: brazil84 09 December 2015 08:23:17AM 0 points [-]

http://www.psych.nyu.edu/gollwitzer/09_Gollwitzer_Sheeran_Seifert_Michalski_When_Intentions_.pdf

Umm, that article completely supports my position:

When other people take notice of one’s identity-relevant behavioral intentions, one’s performance of the intended behaviors is compromised. This effect occurs both when the intentions are experimenter supplied and when they are self-generated, and is observed in both immediate performance and performance measured over a period of 1 week.

If this is the only evidence you have -- besides your own logic and common sense -- then you may want to rethink your position.

Comment author: Elo 09 December 2015 08:57:55AM 0 points [-]

Like I said:

Given that the effect is limited to committed individuals—those who are most eager to reach their identity goals

Future research might address this question

Future research is needed to solve this question. This means that future research is needed to solve the question. Until then; it seems that we can't resolve this without the future research. I hold a position that is built off of your position as a foundation, using the same sources (and their conclusions), and some reasoning from first principles based on comments in the article.

Comment author: brazil84 09 December 2015 09:11:15AM 0 points [-]

Future research is needed to solve this question.

Exactly what question?

Comment author: Elo 09 December 2015 11:01:18PM *  0 points [-]

Given that the effect is limited to committed individuals—those who are most eager to reach their identity goals—an important question is how these individuals might try to escape this effect.

and

Given that:
sometimes goal sharing will be bad
sometimes goal sharing will be good

is goal sharing mostly good or mostly bad?