Every January, we play out the same ritual. We vow to eat better, save more or work out consistently—and feel a rush of optimism as we take the first steps toward our goals.
It’s true that setting clear goals can be a powerful way to increase motivation and persistence. But what if that persistence has a downside? What if the very act of pursuing a goal makes us unwilling or unable to adopt better ways of achieving it?
That’s the conclusion of a new study by marketing professors Elizabeth M.S. Friedman, Guy Voichek and Ravi Dhar. The researchers found that across many different contexts, setting a specific goal and making progress toward it can actually make people less likely to switch to a more effective approach.
“I think a lot of people have the idea that if you set a goal, you’re going to be focused on the best way to achieve it,” said Friedman, Assistant Professor of Marketing at Columbia Business School. “We found that this is not the case.”
In other words, while goals may be good for getting us off the couch, they can also lock us into suboptimal habits.
Uncovering the hidden cost of getting started
Previous studies had shown that people often fail to change course simply due to inertia. For example, one 2023 study found that people are more likely to work on a tedious task instead of a more interesting one if they had already started doing the tedious task. Friedman, Voichek and Dhar built on this line of research by exploring whether setting a goal would help people overcome that inertia or exacerbate it.
They started by designing a study in which participants were asked to rearrange a collection of letters into words. For each correctly solved puzzle, they earned a small amount of money. After their first attempt, they were given the option to switch to an easier task: Instead of rearranging letters into words, they simply had to identify which of two words had fewer letters. If they chose this option, they would earn slightly more for every correct solution.
The researchers encouraged one cohort of participants to set an explicit earnings goal before starting. Other participants were not asked to set a goal. Despite the opportunity to earn more by simply identifying the word with fewer letters, the participants who had set an earnings goal were significantly less likely to switch from the first, more difficult, task.
Curious to see whether goal setting would affect people’s actions in other situations, the researchers designed another 12 studies across several domains, including real-world scenarios involving healthy eating and investing. The results held across all the studies. “Our findings were pretty dramatic,” Friedman said. “If you’ve set a goal and begun making real progress toward it with the first method you’ve used, you’re less likely to adopt better methods as they become available.”
What’s more, the effect is even stronger with numerical goals such as saving a certain amount of money per month or running a certain number of miles per week. The likely reason is that the ease of quantifying progress toward those goals makes people less likely to switch to a more effective alternative path.
Why we should actively consider alternative strategies
So, should we toss goals out the window altogether? Not so fast, say the researchers.
There was one scenario in which they saw different results. Across several tests, if the researchers reminded participants to consider the advantages of both their initial approach and an alternative method of pursuing their goals, they were much more likely to switch to a more effective course, even if they had already made progress toward their goal.
“We’re definitely not telling people not to set goals,” Friedman said. “It’s more that there’s this weird thing that can happen when you set goals that you should be aware of and think about ways to navigate.”
Here’s an example of how the lessons from this research might apply in the real world. Say you’ve set a goal to lose 15 pounds in six months, with an initial strategy of jogging three times a week. After two months, you’ve lost five pounds—solid progress. Then you read an article drawing on reliable research that says a combination of jogging and lifting weights is ideal for shedding pounds and keeping the weight off. Even though you’ve already made significant strides toward your goal, you might choose to replace one of your weekly jogs with a lifting session and find that you hit your goal 15 pound goal earlier than expected, or end up losing even more weight by the end of the six-month period than you would have if you stuck exclusively to jogging.
Similarly, businesses and organization leaders can benefit from the study’s findings by scheduling regular check-ins with their teams after setting organization-wide goals. At each meeting, team members can actively consider the pros and cons of their current strategies and compare alternative options that may be more efficient and productive.
Ultimately, the study underscores the importance of staying open to better courses of action if you want to achieve your goals. “Just be aware that the first way you go about pursuing a goal might not be the best,” Friedman said. “Consciously thinking of the potential advantages of other ways you could be doing things will help you stay more flexible as you go after the things you want.”
