MAKING A BACKUP PLAN UNDERMINES PERFORMANCE

The study: Jihae Shin of Wisconsin School of Business and her coauthor, Katherine Milkman of Wharton, gave 160 university students a sentence-unscrambling task and promised an energy bar to those who performed it well. Before receiving the text to work on, half the participants were asked to think about different ways they could obtain free food on campus should they fail to earn the snack. People prompted to think about those backup plans unscrambled significantly fewer sentences, on average, than people who hadn’t been asked to formulate a plan B. The challenge: When we think about what we’ll do if we fail to achieve our goals, are we less likely to succeed? Can backup plans backfire? Professor Shin, defend your research. Shin: That was our hypothesis, and it proved true not only…

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Harvard Business Review (Digital) - 1 Issue, September 2016

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