In this episode, what the world of work can learn from the psychology of games. Yet many people pay money to do one set of activities and resent doing the other. Both involve painstaking effort and repetitive tasks. Play and work may have more in common than we think. You’ve heard the old adage: slow and steady wins the race. As you consider your resolutions for the new year, this might be good to keep in mind. It feels good to complete a task, but pre-crastinating can lead to hasty decisions - and more work in the long run. In our quest to get stuff done, we may not always make the best decisions, the researchers explain. “Surprisingly, they preferred the bucket closer to the starting point, actually carrying it farther.” When asked why they made this decision, most people said something along the lines of, “I wanted to get the task done as soon as possible.” The problem, of course, was that the bucket was actually farther away from the end point, so the volunteers made the task harder and more time-consuming for themselves. “We expected students to choose the bucket closer to the end because it would have to be carried a shorter distance,” the researchers write. They told people to choose whichever bucket seemed easier, then carry it to the end of the walkway. One bucket was on the left side of a walkway the other on the right. At Scientific American, psychologists David Rosenbaum and Edward Wasserman explore the problem of “pre-crastination.” That is, “the inclination to complete tasks quickly just for the sake of getting things done sooner rather than later.” Rosenbaum and colleagues explored this idea in a study where they asked people to carry one of two buckets. Goals are great, but in our endless effort to get things done, our desire for productivity can sometimes backfire. I don't even notice the pain of the workout. “So time is flying while I'm there,” Milkman says. In Milkman’s case, it was listening to audiobooks: She stuck to her resolution of working out more often by only allowing herself to listen to The Hunger Games at the gym. To keep your resolutions this year, try something Milkman calls “temptation building.” Link your aspirational habit to an existing habit that you already enjoy. Of course, it’s one thing to set goals and quite another to stick with them. In the scheme of things, January 1st may just be any other day, but it’s a good excuse to take advantage of the fresh start effect and set some resolutions. So when we make resolutions, it really does feel like a “new you” is setting the goal. “At those break points, including the start of a new year, we feel like we’re further from our past self.” This temporal distance allows us to see our past failures almost as the failures of a different person. We also talk with psychologist Mahzarin Banaji about whether research on implicit bias tells us more about groups than it does about individuals. “We think of life in chapters,” psychologist Katy Milkman says. In the second part of our series on implicit bias, we explore the relationship between beliefs and behaviors. You don’t need to wait for the new year to start a new habit, but there’s a good reason we do: The fresh start effect.
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