EXPRESS: The Making-Up-For-Failure Nudge: Framing Subgoals as Opportunities for Redemption Increases Goal Persistence

Abstract

Small failures during goal pursuit are inevitable and often derail consumers from reaching their overall goals. This research demonstrates one simple, cost-free nudge: encouraging consumers to make up for small failures. The making-up-for-failure nudge encourages more goal-consistent action today to make up for failing to reach one’s goal yesterday. This leads consumers to perceive the day after a failure as an opportunity to redeem themselves, encoding missing this opportunity as two goal failures (both the previously failed subgoal and the current subgoal) rather than one (just the current subgoal). As a result, consumers anticipate feeling worse about missing their opportunity to redeem themselves than failing a subgoal itself. To avoid the heightened negative anticipated emotion of failing not one, but two , subgoals, consumers are motivated to engage in more goal-consistent behavior after failure. This effect is documented in two longitudinal real-behavior studies, four real-behavior lab studies, and one hypothetical study across various domains (i.e., learning a new language, exercising, and word search games). Three relevant boundary conditions are identified, including 1) how people feel after failure, 2) difficulty/ease of making up for failure, and 3) when people are encouraged to make up for their failure.