Why Announcing Your Goal Can Backfire
Telling people about an identity goal can give you the feeling of having arrived. Reporting progress to someone you respect tends to help.
Key takeaways
- In Peter Gollwitzer's 2009 studies, law students whose identity intentions were noticed worked about 41 minutes, against about 46 when their intentions were ignored.
- A 2016 meta-analysis of 138 studies found monitoring progress helped more when the progress was reported to someone.
- In 2020 studies by Howard Klein and colleagues, sharing a goal with a higher-status person raised commitment.
- Share the plan and the progress, with someone whose judgement you respect; keep the identity claim to yourself.
Common advice says that announcing your goal makes you more likely to reach it, because once people know, you will not want to let them down. A small set of experiments suggests the opposite can happen: telling people can give you some of the satisfaction of having achieved the goal, and you work less for it. Both claims have evidence behind them. The question worth asking is which kind of announcement does which.
Weldon Long's The Power of Consistency, a guide for sales and business professionals, comes down firmly on the private side. Its premise, stated early and repeated later in the book, is that private declarations dictate future actions: write your goal, read it every day, and let the discomfort of not acting on it do the work that willpower cannot. Long is candid about the evidence. Early in the book he writes that he does not have "reams of research" behind his methods. The research that exists turns out to be more interesting than either a private or a public rule.
The law students who worked less
The study that made the case against announcing goals was published in Psychological Science in 2009 by Peter Gollwitzer and three colleagues, including Paschal Sheeran, under the title "When intentions go public".
Its focus was a particular kind of goal: an intention tied to who you want to be, such as becoming a good lawyer or a clinical psychologist. The authors drew on symbolic self-completion theory, which Gollwitzer had developed with Robert Wicklund. The idea is that people pursue an identity by collecting signs of it, and that being seen as having the identity can count as one of those signs.
In one study, 30 law students who were strongly committed to making the best use of their education were given criminal law cases to work on. For some, the experimenter took notice of the intentions they had stated. For others, the intentions were ignored. Those whose intentions had been noticed worked for an average of about 41 minutes; those whose intentions were ignored worked for about 46.
The pattern repeated across four experiments. In a week-long study, psychology students whose intentions stayed private acted on them on more days than those whose intentions had been noticed. In a third study, the effect held among students strongly committed to the identity and not among those weakly committed. In a fourth, having an intention noticed made people feel closer to already possessing the identity, which is the mechanism the authors proposed: telling others gives a premature sense of having arrived.
The studies are small (the law-student one had 30 participants), and we have found no direct replication. They are a careful demonstration of a possibility, not a settled law.
The idea behind them is easy to recognise in everyday life. Announcing your goal of writing a novel at a dinner party earns interest and a little admiration, and the admiration arrives before a single chapter exists. Posting your goal of running a marathon brings congratulations for something that has not yet happened. If the 2009 account is right, that early reward is not harmless. It satisfies some of the need that was meant to drive the work.