Success! Why
Expectations Beat Fantasies
Are you building castles in the sky?
Psychologists have found that fantasising about future
success can be dangerous.
We all have fantasies about the future.
It’s only natural to dream happy dreams about how things
might go right.
We often hear from self-help gurus that just this type of
happy dreaming is
a good source of motivation. If we can picture our future
success then this will help motivate us.
Loosely speaking there is some truth to this: positive
thinking about the future is broadly beneficial. But psychologists have found
that visualization and fantasy can be tricky customers
and research carried out by Oettingen and Mayer
(2002) shows why.
Fantasy versus
expectation
The researchers wanted to see how people cope with four
different challenges that life throws at us: getting a job, finding a partner,
doing well in an exam and undergoing surgery
(hopefully not all at the same time).
Across four studies the researchers examined how people
thought about each of these challenges. They measured how much
they fantasised about a positive outcome
and how much they expected a positive outcome.
The difference might sound relatively trivial, but it’s
not.
Expectations are based on past experiences.
You expect to do well in an exam because you’ve done well
in previous exams,
you expect to meet another partner because you managed to
meet your last partner, and so on.
Fantasies, though, involve imagining something you hope
will happen in the future,
but experiencing it right now. This turns out to be
problematic.
The researchers found that when trying to get a job, find
a partner, pass an exam
or get through surgery, those who spent more time
entertaining positive fantasies did worse.
Take those looking for a job. Those who spent more time
dreaming about getting a job,
performed worse. Two years after leaving college the
dreamers:
had applied for fewer job, unsurprisingly had been
offered fewer jobs,
and, if they were in work, had lower salaries.
On the other hand those who entertained more negative
future fantasies
were more likely to achieve their goals. Similar results
were seen for the other goals.
Although positive fantasies were associated with failure,
positive expectations were associated with success.
People who had positive expectations about finding a
partner, recovering quickly from surgery
and passing an exam, did better than those whose expectations
were negative.
Recall that expectations are built on solid foundations
while positive fantasies are often built on thin air.
Why positive fantasies are dangerous
The problem with positive fantasies is that they allow us
to anticipate success in the here and now. However they don’t alert us to the
problems we are likely to face along the way
and can leave us with less motivation—after all it feels
like we’ve already reached our goal.
It’s one way in which our minds own brilliance lets us
down.
Because it’s so amazing at simulating our achievement of
future events,
it can actually undermine our attempts to achieve those
goals in reality.
This isn’t to say that thinking positively about the
future is problematic
or that fantasy in itself is dangerous, just that a
certain type of positive fantasy thinking
is associated with poorer performance.
So that’s a warning about the dangers of visualization
and fantasy in goal-achievement,
onto more positive findings about motivation and success
in future posts.
I expect.
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