Happy New Year!
If you’ve read How to Change, you know that early January is reliably weird for me because every reporter, podcaster, radio host and tv anchor is desperate to interview someone (anyone!) for a story on New Year’s resolutions. And guess what pops up if you Google “scientist who studies New Year's resolutions”? No, it’s not Bill Nye… (for a hint, see the photo below)
One bit of excitement that accompanied this year’s short-lived uptick in my popularity was seeing How to Change shoot back up the Amazon charts on January 1st (it once again spent time among the site’s top 100 audiobooks, which was pretty cool!). If you’d like to check out some of the new and re-released media coverage featuring my advice on achieving your New Year’s resolutions, you can visit CNN, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, Vox, Fortune, NPR’s Hidden Brain, and NPR’s The Indicator.
But enough about my New Year’s media whirlwind. What I really want to share with you today is an interview featuring some terrific science that suggests we can (and should) do more with less in 2023 and beyond. When I think about my New Year’s resolutions, in fact, they’re all about cutting back. Not necessarily on calories or bad behavior, but rather on excess commitments. And appreciating the power of downsizing requires overcoming a bias that’s the focus of this month’s Q&A.
First, as always, I have a few recommendations...
This Month’s Recommended Listens and Reads
Are You the Same Person You Used to Be?: This thought-provoking New Yorker article summarizes fascinating reflections and research on the stability of your personality starting from childhood.
How You Spend It: In this recent Choiceology episode, I interview Cassie Holmes (author of my favorite book of 2022) about why and how it boosts our happiness to focus more on how we spend our time than how we spend our money.
Six Books that Will Help You Succeed on Your New Year’s Resolutions: These are all evidence-based books penned by scientists, and they are my favorite books in this vein (yes, I’m shamelessly including my own).
Q&A: Doing More with Less
In this Q&A from Choiceology, University of Virginia Professor Gabrielle Adams describes her research on our bias towards adding more to our projects, calendars and organizations and why our failure to notice opportunities to subtract can hold us back.
Me: Gabe, I’m really excited to talk about your work on subtraction. What does it mean when you say people systematically overlook subtractive changes?
Gabe: When people want to improve something, they tend to only think about what they can add, not consider what they might take away. My collaborators and I have a series of observational studies showing that subtractive changes are psychologically inaccessible unless we prompt or cue or remind people to think about subtraction as an option.
Me: Could you talk about some of your research showing this?
Gabe: To study this, we gave people a small LEGO structure with an unstable platform on top. We asked people to improve the structure so that it could hold a heavy brick on the platform above a little mini-Stormtrooper figurine’s head. In a control condition we said that you can modify the structure however you choose and that adding pieces costs 10 cents. Participants in the reminder condition got the same instructions but were also told that removing pieces is free. This is, if you think about it, redundant information, right? It merely cues them to think about subtraction as an option.
Participants all received a dollar and a bowl of extra LEGO bricks. One of the ways that they can make it stable is of course by adding bricks to the remaining three corners, which would cost 30 cents. But participants could also improve the structure by subtracting the one brick that made the platform unstable. What we find is that participants are more likely to stumble upon that solution when they’re reminded that removing pieces is free.
Me: One of the things I love about your research on this topic is that you’ve studied “subtraction neglect” across a wide range of settings and showed that it applies to problems in organizations, too. Could you talk about that work?
Gabe: We have one study that we did with a university president who was asking employees and stakeholders, “what are all the ways that you can make this place better?”
Like any good group of behavioral scientists, we got our hands on this data and we coded the thousands of suggestions for whether the suggestion was intended to create change by adding something to the university—more opportunities for travel or study abroad or grants, for example—or whether the changes were subtractive in nature. What are the things that are not working that we can get rid of? The vast majority of ideas that were submitted were additive. It's one of the studies that I like to bring up when thinking about the organizational implications, because we're potentially overlooking a way to expand the number of suggestions by thinking about ways in which we might subtract.
Me: What is it that causes people to overlook these opportunities to subtract?
Gabe: These are mechanisms that we haven't tested in our research, so I'll conjecture here a little bit. I think there could be a wide variety of reasons that rest in culture or in evolution perhaps. We know, for example, that it's harder for children to learn about subtraction than it is for them to learn about addition. To subtract, you have to first imagine whatever you're subtracting as present, and so it's this extra cognitive step. We've looked at this across various cultures—in Japan, in Germany. What we tend to find is that there's actually more variability in subtraction within any given culture than there is between cultures, but I think the jury is still out. We need to collect more data to investigate that.
Me: Do you think of this as a bias that generally leads people to make worse decisions?
Gabe: I think that one implication of this research is that people are missing out on some ideas. When we’re trying to come up with ways to change something or solve a problem, in order to make good decisions, we need to carefully and thoughtfully consider all the options that are on the table.
Me: What, if anything, do you do differently in your life now that you’ve become an expert on this topic?
Gabe: I think a lot about ways in which I can take things away from my schedule. And I have a colleague who whenever she cancels or says no to a meeting, she actually leaves it in her calendar so that when she gets to that time, it feels like this gift of time that she has received. In doing so, she is making the fact that she has subtracted noticeable. I think the problem is that we tend not to notice things that we subtracted, right? Subtracting things literally means that they aren't there anymore and so we can't learn to subtract because it's not being reinforced.
So, how do we remember to do it? I think my colleague has hit upon a really great way to remember the importance of subtraction in her own life, so I've stolen that tip from her.
Me: I love that. For people who have other concerns, like how to be successful at managing their finances, how to be happy in their home life, or how to stay healthy, what do you think their key takeaway should be from this?
Gabe: The contribution of this research is to expand the ways in which people can solve problems. When we think about how to better manage our money, how to better save, how to eat healthier, how to exercise more, those are all problems that we are trying to solve. What we're constantly trying to do is design solutions. So, we have to think of ourselves as miniature designers and think about ways in which we can design better solutions, better products, better schedules, better savings plans. We have to remember that part of the design process is about taking things away. Sometimes we just need to think, “Do I really need this? Would my life be better if I didn't do this or have this?”
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
To learn more about research on subtraction neglect, listen to the episode of Choiceology where we dig into the topic or pick up a copy of Gabe’s collaborator Leidy Klotz’s book Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less.
That’s all for this month’s newsletter. See you in February!
Katy Milkman, PhD
Professor at Wharton, Host of Choiceology, an original podcast from Charles Schwab, and Bestselling Author of How to Change
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