Sublime

There is, of course, a downside.

people have a general tendency to stick with their current situation.

The second ingredient in effective target setting is making sure your target is easy to measure.

companies have a strong incentive to exploit behavioral biases, including availability, unrealistic optimism, and anchoring.

Our model is really based on a metaphor. We propose that at any point in time an individual consists of two selves. There is a forward-looking “planner” who has good intentions and cares about the future, and a devil-may-care “doer” who lives for the present.

Thus, the ads mostly affected the people who were in a “deciding” mindset when those ads ran.

Professor Sheena Iyengar from the Columbia Business School is a psycho-economist who specializes in decision making. Her famous “jam study” was done using specialty jams in a grocery store.

This study explains why multipurpose items often end up serving no purpose at all—we’d rather a pen just be a pen.

The first ingredient in setting an effective target is to make it somewhat optimistic.