The Making Up for Failure Nudge: Framing Subgoals as Opportunities for Redemption Increases Goal Persistence

Abstract

Small failures during goal pursuit are inevitable and often derail people from reaching their overall goals. We demonstrate the effectiveness of one simple, cost-free nudge: encouraging people to make up for small failures. For instance, the making up for failure nudge encourages people to complete more goal-consistent action today (e.g., 40 minutes) to make up for the failure to reach their goal yesterday (e.g., 20 minutes). This nudge leads people to perceive the day after a failure as an opportunity to redeem themselves, encoding missing such opportunity as experiencing two goal failures (both the past loss and the future loss), rather than one (just a future loss). As a result, people anticipate experiencing greater negative emotion about failing to miss their opportunity to redeem themselves than failing a subgoal itself. To avoid the heightened negative anticipated emotion of failing not one, but two, subgoals, people are motivated to engage in more goal-consistent behavior after failure. This effect is documented in two longitudinal real-behavior studies, four real-behavior lab studies, and two hypothetical studies across various domains (i.e., learning a new language, exercising, wordsearch game; (total N = 8,668 adults). Two relevant boundary conditions are identified, including 1) ease of making up for failure and 2) when people are encouraged to make up for their failure.

Keywords: nudge, motivation, failure, goal pursuit