I had the good fortune to take a relaxing week-long vacation in California earlier this month (my favorite tide pool photo from the trip is below). Naturally, my time away meant I returned to an overflowing inbox. If you’re taking a summer vacation, I’d be willing to bet your inbox will get backed up too. Whenever things pile up, I find it helpful to set goals for getting work back under control, so I thought covering some more research on goals would be an excellent topic for this month’s newsletter. In April, I shared a Q&A about the importance of breaking big goals down into smaller subgoals. Today, I’m picking up on that thread with an interview exploring the magnetism and power of round number goals.
But first, as always, here are a few of my favorite recent listens and reads.
Recommended Listens and Reads
Choiceology’s Guide to Nudges: This recent Choiceology episode takes a tour of the “nudge” revolution in behavioral science, and it features an in-depth interview with Nobel laureate and nudger extraordinaire, Richard Thaler.
Summer Resolutions: A recent Fast Company article suggests summer may be the perfect time to set some resolutions, and it cites my work on the power of fresh starts.
The Amazing Effects of $200 + 8 Weeks of Therapy: A new study conducted in Liberia with remarkably promising and durable benefits is summarized in this fascinating Washington Post op-ed.
Q&A: Round Number Goals
In this Q&A from Choiceology, University of Chicago Booth School of Business Behavioral Science and Economics professor Devin Pope explains his research on round number goals and their magnetism.
Me: Let's start by talking a little bit about what goals are and why they influence people's behavior.
Devin: Yeah, it's interesting, right? From a very standard economics perspective, you might imagine they don't matter very much. There's no contract attached to a goal. There's nothing that says I'm going to have to pay out a bunch of money if I don't reach this goal. But they do matter, and we all know this. Goals are often used to impose psychological costs and benefits on ourselves.
Me: Is there anything interesting about the goals people choose to set for themselves?
Devin: One thing that some co-authors and I have worked on is that a lot of times people set goals at round numbers. If I asked you what the most common marathon running time is, your answer might be "somewhere around four hours." If you're familiar with marathons, that tends to be the middle of the distribution. A better answer would be three hours and 59 minutes or three hours and 58 minutes. What's clear from the data is that people want to beat round number goals. So a lot of people finish marathons right before their stated goal time.
You also see it in other places that are a bit more surprising. So, for example, Uri Simonsohn and I find that SAT takers are more likely to retake the SAT if their score falls just below a round number. If you got an 1190 on the SAT, you're much more likely to retake the exam than if you got a 1200. And this is the type of round number goal that might actually be a bad thing. Maybe if you got a 1200, you should also be retaking the SAT and yet, you don't feel quite such a strong motivation to do so because you've already hit a round number goal.
Me: That makes me think about my Fitbit, which jiggles when I get 10,000 steps. Sometimes I take extra steps in the bedroom before bed, which drives my husband nuts, because I'm at 9,750 and I can't bear to go to bed before 10,000. Is that normal?
Devin: Yes, for your sake, I'll say it's normal. So that jiggle, little things like that can be enough to really motivate us. The psychology matters.
Me: Do you have a perspective on what it is that makes us connect to round numbers?
Devin: It's still a little unclear why people choose round numbers as goals, but I think there's a couple potential reasons. One is just convenience. You have to choose some goal, and it makes more sense to choose a goal of getting a 3.0 GPA than a 2.987. Round numbers are easy to remember.
Another explanation is related to left digit bias. This bias argues that people pay more attention to left digit numbers than digits that are further to the right in a number. This bias would explain why stores price things at $2.99, and of course that's because it feels cheaper than if it was priced at $3.00 because you're focused on the two. If you can run a three hour and 59 minute marathon, it just seems a lot better than running a four hour marathon. There's this discontinuity in terms of how cool it seems because we care about left digits. So that's another reason why we might set round numbers at goals. For example, not very many people want to buy their wife a .99 carat diamond, but a one carat diamond ... that's a very nice diamond.
Me: Fascinating. Okay, so round numbers are convenient, reflect left digit bias, and successfully motivate us. How can we best harness goals to achieve more?
Devin: My colleague, George Wu, here at the University of Chicago asks runners who are about to run a marathon to actually write down a goal. Most of them have already thought of some goal, but having them write it down makes it a little bit more concrete. And they often choose round numbers. But what he finds is that those people who wrote down their goal end up running faster.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
To learn more about research on round number goals, listen to the episode of Choiceology where we dig into the topic.
That’s all for this month’s newsletter, and I’ll be taking the rest of the summer off from Milkman Delivers. I look forward to being back in touch in September!
Katy Milkman, PhD
Professor at Wharton, Host of Choiceology, an original podcast from Charles Schwab, and Bestselling Author of How to Change