Imagine that you decide to eat healthy food 6 days per week. However, after you make up your mind, you eat a whole chocolate cake on the first day of the week. How likely are you to persist in eating healthily for the following 6 days? People who experience an initial failure like this may feel less motivated to reach their long-term healthy eating goal. Previous literature has shown that framing goals with emergency reserves such as “eating healthily 6 days per week with 2 emergency skip days” motivate people to reach their long-term goals before encountering a failure. Let’s take a look at Sharif and Shu’s (2021) study about how emergency reserves influence persistence after failure experiences. 

While Sharif and Shu did a series of experiments, the current article mainly focuses on introducing the field experiment that aimed to examine how goals framed with emergency reserves influence individuals’ behaviors in a real-life exercise setting. According to the researchers, emergency reserves refer to “slack around a goal that can be used if necessary but at a small psychological cost”. They recruited 315 undergraduate students and university staff to participate in the experiment. They asked participants to track their steps for 5 weeks and recorded their steps on a Google spreadsheet every night. The baseline steps were recorded during the first week. Participants were then randomly assigned to one of four weekly goal conditions varied in the difficulty of reaching and the presence of emergency reserves. They continued to track their steps every night for the rest of the four weeks. The results of linear regression analyses showed that on average, individuals in reserve conditions reached their step goals for about 40% more days per week than those who did not have emergency reserves. Moreover, individuals who failed to reach their daily step goal and applied their emergency reserve were more likely to persist after the failure. Interestingly, when reaching a daily goal was important to reaching the weekly goal, individuals with emergency reserves were significantly more likely to reach the essential daily step goal than those without reserve and had a hard-to-reach goal (complete step goals 7 days a week). In the following lab experiments, Sharif and Shu not only replicated the findings in the field experiment but also found mediational evidence that individuals with reserves felt a greater sense of making progress after a failure, leading them to feel more committed to their goal and thus persist more.

Sharif and Shu’s (2021) study sheds light on the importance of framing goals with emergency reserves to individuals’ persistence after failures. It also proposes several future research directions. For instance, researchers can explore how the timing of applying emergency reserves affects an individual’s persistence. Perhaps having a choice of applying emergency reserves to a foreseeable failure may either positively or negatively influence an individual’s persistence.

In accordance with EPIC’s goal of helping individuals to overcome failures, Sharif and Shu’s (2021) study suggests that how students frame their long-term learning goals and interpret their failures may influence their persistence after encountering subgoal failures. Perhaps educators and teachers can motivate students to reach their goals in both an external and internal way. They may give a grace period for late homework assignments per semester. They may also talk with each student and help them customize their own emergency reserves.

For more information about Sharif and Shu’s (2021) study, check out the link below for the journal article:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0749597818304187?via%3Dihub

Reference:

Sharif, M. A., & Shu, S. B. (2021). Nudging persistence after failure through emergency reserves. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 163, 17–29. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.obhdp.2019.01.004