Dr. Heidi Grant

3 Keys to Finding Love and Hanging On to It

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If you want to be happy in your relationship, what are the most important ingredients?  Everybody has a theory about what it takes to live happily ever after, and no two people seem to agree.  So let’s look instead at what science tells us will lead to relationship bliss, and how best to tackle three of the major challenges we face when trying to find, and keep, that Special Someone.

#1. What to Look For In a Mate: Someone Agreeable, Conscientious, and Emotionally Stable

According to the researchers, people with spouses who are agreeable, conscientious, and emotionally stable report being significantly happier in their marriages.  So if your romantic partner is a sourpuss, selfish and irresponsible, and has a tendency to fly off the handle, your chances of finding marital bliss together are not good.

Look for someone generally pleasant, responsible, and even-tempered, and in fairness to them, be willing to return the favor.

#2. How to Know If He (or She) Loves You Back:  It’s The Little Things

“If you really loved me, you would….”

Everyone who’s ever been in a relationship has had thoughts like this one.  If he loved me he would bring me flowers, or compliment me more often, or remember my birthday, or remember to take out the damn garbage.  When it comes to love, actions speak louder than words, right?

Well, not necessarily.  According to new research, romantic feelings like love, intimacy, and commitment reliably lead to some loving behaviors – the smaller, spontaneous acts of kindness that occur without much forethought, like offering a backrub, making a nice dinner, or letting you have the last brownie in the pan.  These “little things” are a much better indicator of the depth of his love than whether or not he remembers your birthday or to take out the trash.

#3  How to Fight Well:  Treat Little Problems and Big Problems Differently

The best way to deal with conflict in a relationship depends on how serious or severe the problem is.  Did your boyfriend drink too much at the party last night, or is he drinking too much every night?  Did your wife splurge a little too much on clothes last month, or are her spending habits edging you closer and closer to bankruptcy?  Did he invite his mother to dinner without discussing it with you first, or did he invite his mother to live with you without discussing it first?  Little problems and big problems require very different approaches if you want to have a lasting, happy relationship.

When it comes to relatively minor problems, direct fighting strategies – like placing blame on your partner for their actions or expressing your anger – predict a loss of relationship satisfaction over time.   Flying off the handle when he forgets to take out the garbage yet again, or when she spends a little too much money on a pricey pair of shoes, is going to take its toll on your happiness in the long run.  You really are better off letting the small stuff go.

On the other hand, in response to major problems, couples who battle it out do a better job of tackling, and eventually resolving those issues, than those who sweep big problems under the carpet.

So when you are deciding whether or not something is worth fighting over with your partner, ask yourself if, in the scheme of things, the problem is a 10 or a 2.  If it’s a 2, try letting it go.  But if it’s a 10, let the battle begin.  You’ll both be happier that way.

How to Walk Away When It’s Not Working

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Sometimes, you don’t know when to throw in the towel.   As time passes, it becomes clear that things aren’t working out as you planned.  You realize that pursuing whatever it is that you’re pursuing, whether it’s being successful in your current career, mending a troubled relationship, or renovating your house from top to bottom, will cost you too much financially or emotionally, or take too long.  But instead of moving on to new opportunities, all too often you simply stay the course and sacrifice your own wellbeing in the process.

You aren’t alone.  Most of us know what it’s like to stay in a job or a relationship long after it has ceased being satisfying, or to take on a project that’s just too big for us and be reluctant to admit it.  CEOs have been known to allocate manpower and money to projects long after it’s become clear that they are obviously failing, digging a deeper hole rather than trying to climb their way out of it (Remember how long it took to get rid of New Coke?)

The costs to the person who can’t see reason, in terms of time, effort, and lost opportunities for happiness, can be enormous. We recognize this kind of foolishness immediately in others, but that doesn’t stop us from making the same mistake ourselves.  Why?

There are several powerful and largely unconscious psychological forces at work here.   We may throw good money after bad, or waste time in a dead-end relationship, because we haven’t come up with an alternative, or because we don’t want to admit to our friends and family, or to ourselves, that we were wrong.   But the most likely culprit is our overwhelming aversion to sunk costs.

Sunk costs are the resources that you’ve put into an endeavor that you can’t get back out.   They are the years you spent training for a profession you hate or waiting for your commitment-phobic boyfriend to propose.  They are the money you spent on redecorating your living room in the hot new style, only to find that you hate it living in it.

Once you’ve realized that you probably won’t succeed or that you are unhappy with the results, it shouldn’t matter how much time and effort you’ve already put into something.  If your job or your boyfriend have taken up some of the best years of your life, it doesn’t make sense to let them use up the years you’ve got left. And an ugly living room is an ugly living room, no matter how much money you spent making it so.

The problem is that it doesn’t feel that way.  Putting in a lot only to end up with nothing to show for it is just too awful for most of us to seriously consider.  We worry far too much about what we’ll lose if we just move on, and not nearly enough about the costs of not moving on  – more wasted time and effort, more unhappiness, and more missed opportunities.  So how can we make it easier to know when to cut our losses?

Thanks to recent research by Northwestern University psychologists Daniel Molden and Chin Ming Hui, there is a simple and effective way to be sure you are making the best decisions when a things go awry:  focus on what you have to gain, rather than what you have to lose.

As I’ve written about before, psychologists call this adopting a promotion focus. When we think about our goals in terms of potential gains, we automatically (often without realizing it) become more comfortable with making mistakes and accepting the losses we may have to incur along the way.

When we adopt a prevention focus, on the other hand, and think about our goals in terms of what we could lose if we don’t succeed, we become much more sensitive to sunk costs.

For example, in one of their studies, Molden and Hui put participants into either a promotion or prevention mindset by having them spend five minutes writing about their “personal hopes and aspirations” (promotion) or “duties and obligations” (prevention).  They also included a control group with no manipulation of mindset.

Next, each participant was told to imagine that he or she was president of an aviation company that had committed $10 million to developing a plane that can’t be detected by radar.  With the project near completion and $9 million already spent, a rival company announces the availability of their own radar-blank plane, which is both superior in performance and lower in cost.  The question put to participants was simple – do you invest the remaining $1 million and finish your company’s (inferior and more expensive) plane, or cut your losses and move on?

Molden and Hui found that participants who had been put in a prevention mindset  (focused on avoiding loss) stayed the course and invested the remaining $1 million roughly 80% of the time.  The control group, included to provide a sense of how people would respond without any changes to their mindset, was virtually identical to the prevention group.  This suggests that when things go wrong and sunk costs are high, most of us naturally become prevention-minded, and more likely to try to keep waging a losing battle.

The odds of making that mistake were significantly reduced by adopting a promotion mindset (focused on potential gain) – those participants invested the remaining $1 million less than 60% of the time.*

When we see our goals in terms of what we can gain, rather than what we might lose, we are more likely to see a doomed endeavor for what it is, and try to make the most of a bad situation.

It’s not difficult to achieve greater clarity if you make a deliberate effort to refocus yourself when making your decision.  Stop and reflect on what you have to gain by cutting your losses now – the opportunities for happiness and growth.  If you do, you’ll find it much easier to make the right choice.

*Why not a bigger drop? Good question.  Remember that promotion focus was manipulated very indirectly through a totally unrelated writing task.  If you adopt a promotion focus directly with respect to the decision itself, considering what you could gain by moving on from your failure, the effects should be even stronger.

Why Letting Yourself Make Mistakes Means Making Fewer of Them

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Think back to the last time your boss assigned you a new project or task at work, or the last time you tried to tackle something really difficult in your personal life.  How did it feel?  I’m guessing scary, right?

While some people seem eager to tackle new challenges, many of us are really just trying to survive without committing any major screw-ups.    Taking on something totally new and unfamiliar is understandably frightening, since the odds of making a mistake are good when you are inexperienced.  Small wonder that we greet new challenges with so little enthusiasm.

How can we learn to see things differently?   How can we shift our thinking, and approach new responsibilities and challenges with more confidence and energy?

The answer is simple, though perhaps a little surprising:  Give yourself permission to screw-up. Start any new project by saying  “I’m not going to be good at this right away, I’m going to make mistakes, and that’s okay.”

So now you’re probably thinking, “If I take your advice and actually let myself screw up, there will be consequences.  I’m going to pay for it.”  Fair enough.  But you really needn’t worry about that, because studies show that when people are allowed to make mistakes, they are significantly less likely to actually make them!  Let me explain.

We approach most of what we do with one of two types of goals: what I call be-good goals, where the focus is on proving that you have a lot of ability and already know what you’re doing, and get-better goals, where the focus is on developing your ability and learning a new skill.  It’s the difference between wanting to show that you are smart vs. wanting to get smarter.

The problem with be-good goals is that they tend to backfire when things get hard.  We quickly start to doubt our ability (“Oh no, maybe I’m not good at this!”), and this creates a lot of anxiety.  Ironically, worrying about your ability makes you much more likely to ultimately fail.  Countless studies have shown that nothing interferes with your performance quite like anxiety does – it is the goal-killer.

Get-better goals, on the other hand, are practically bullet-proof.  When we think about what we are doing in terms of learning and improving, accepting that we may make some mistakes along the way, we stay motivated despite the setbacks that might occur.

Just to give you an example, in one study I conducted a few years ago with my graduate student, Laura Gelety, we found that people who were trying to be good (i.e., trying to show how smart they were) performed very poorly on a test of problem-solving when I made the test more difficult (either by interrupting them frequently while they were working, or by throwing in a few additional unsolvable problems).

The amazing thing was, the people who were trying to get better (i.e., who saw the test as an opportunity to learn a new problem-solving skill) were completely unaffected by any of my dirty tricks.  No matter how hard I made it for them, students focused on getting better stayed motivated and did well.

Too often, when the boss gives us an assignment, we expect to be able to do the work flawlessly, no matter how challenging it might be.  The focus is all about being good, and the prospect becomes terrifying.  Even when we are assigning ourselves a new task, we take the same approach – expecting way too much too soon.

The irony is that all this pressure to be good results in many more mistakes, and far inferior performance, than would a focus on getting better.

How can you reframe your goals in terms of getting better? Here are the three steps:

Step 1:  Start by embracing the fact that when something is difficult and unfamiliar, you will need some time to really get a handle on it. You may make some mistakes, and that’s ok.

Step 2:  Remember to ask for help when you run into trouble.  Needing help doesn’t mean you aren’t capable – in fact, the opposite is true.  Only the very foolish believe they can do everything on their own.

Step 3: Try not to compare yourself to other people – instead, compare your performance today to your performance yesterday.  Focusing on getting better means always thinking in terms of progress, not perfection.

What the Science Says is Right, and Wrong, with “Chinese Mothers”

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In her recent Wall Street Journal essay, Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior, Yale law professor and mother-of-two Amy Chua provides a recipe for the kind of parenting that produces “successful” children of the math-whiz and music-prodigy variety.   Her depiction of the strict and domineering Chinese mother (Chua’s own children were never allowed to have play dates, choose their own extracurricular activities, watch TV, or get any grade less than an A) is deliberately provocative and unapologetic. It has elicited strong reactions from its largely Western audience – some applause, but mostly shock and outrage.

As a psychologist and scientist specializing in achievement (and as a mother of two myself), I must admit that some of what Ms. Chua is saying is perfectly true and worth taking to heart – particularly when she writes about the importance of emphasizing effort and persistence as keys to success, rather than innate ability.

Both in the laboratory and the classroom, I’ve seen people with very high IQs (children and adults) give up on a new task the moment it became difficult, and I’ve seen people of seemingly lesser ability fight their way through to the end and master the material.  When you study achievement, one of the first things you learn is that innate ability (to the extent that there is such a thing) has surprisingly little to do with success, while effort and persistence have everything to do with it.

Unfortunately, American students (and their parents) tend be big believers in innate ability – as if some people are just born capable of long division.  These kids aren’t reaching their full potential because they give up on themselves way too soon.

Asian students aren’t making the same mistake, because they are explicitly taught to blame their poor performances (and credit their successes) on the effort they put in to them.  It makes sense that Asians would excel in subjects like math, science, and musicianship, which require determination and long hours to master. Teaching Western kids to hang in there, and helping them to understand what it really takes to succeed, would go a long way toward closing that achievement gap.

I also happen to agree with Ms. Chua that we have a bit of a problem these days when it comes to emphasizing self-esteem protection over honest feedback. I know firsthand that it’s not easy to tell your child that he screwed up, knowing it will cause him anxiety, disappointment, or embarrassment.  But when we protect feelings at the expense of the truth, when we say  “you tried your best” when in fact they did nothing of the sort, we rob them of a sense of personal control over their own achievements.  Nothing is more de-motivating than feeling powerless to improve.

Calling your child “garbage,” or “fatty” (two examples given by Ms Chua),  on the other hand, is really not a great idea – nor is it even remotely necessary.   Guilt and shame can be motivating, but they can also be highly disruptive to the learning process. The most motivating and effective feedback focuses not on what your child is, but what he does, and what he can do differently in the future.

Where I part ways completely with Ms. Chua (and here the science is clearly on my side) is in her insistence that enjoyment, interest, and freedom of choice are somehow incompatible with hard work, persistence, and success. She writes:

“What Chinese parents understand is that nothing is fun until you’re good at it. To get good at anything you have to work, and children on their own never want to work, which is why it is crucial to override their preferences.”

This is factually false, on all counts.  Again and again, research has shown that when children feel they have choices, it creates intrinsic motivation – the desire to do something for it’s own sake.   With choice, they enjoy what they are doing more.  They are more creative, process information more deeply, persist longer and achieve more.  Intrinsic motivation is in fact awesome in its power to get and keep us going.   Your kids will work hard of their own free will, and even have fun doing it, when you don’t completely override their preferences.

In the end, we would be wise to take what is beneficial about the “Chinese mother” approach – the dogged emphasis on effort, the encouragement to not give up too soon, the willingness to be critical when necessary – without the aspects that have given Western readers of Ms. Chua’s essay so much pause: the total absence of autonomy and choice, the lack of play, and the borderline-abusive insults.   There is very little evidence that these provide children any benefit, and clear evidence that they can undermine not only intrinsic motivation, but self-confidence and well-being.

Parents really don’t need to choose between having motivated, hard-working children, and happy, autonomous children who have lots of fun.   Combine the best of what Ms. Chua’s “Chinese” and “Western” mothers do, and you can help your children to be successful in every sense of the word.

Why Generic Products Can Make You Feel Bad About Yourself

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From my Fast Company blog:

People often buy brand-name products over their generic alternatives for fairly obvious reasons.  They may trust high-end brands more, or feel that using them conveys to others a sense of their own taste, coolness, or affluence.

But the influence of brands and logos on our behavior goes well beyond the moment of product choice – when actually using the product, we continue to feel the brand’s influence.  For instance, studies show that people give more creative solutions to a problem after seeing an Apple logo than an IBM logo. Other studies have shown that wearing counterfeit versions of brand-name products makes people feel less authentic, and actually increases their likelihood of both behaving dishonesty and distrusting others.

A new paper from researchers at National Sun Yat-Sen University in Taiwan offers yet another surprising demonstration of the power of branding: Using a generic product, rather than a brand-name one, can actually undermine the user’s sense of self-worth.

In one study, college seniors seated at a desktop Mac were randomly assigned to use either a generic keyboard and mouse or brand-name Apple accessories.  They used the computer to fill out an online resume, and after finishing were asked to estimate their future monthly earnings.  Those who used generic accessories said that they would earn, on average, 10% less than those who used the brand-name accessories.

In another study, men were given a cell phone so that they could call a woman they had just been introduced to and ask her on a date. When they tried to use the phone, they discovered that the battery had died, and were given either a brand-name replacement or a cheaper generic cell phone battery.  Men who used the generic battery later rated themselves as significantly less attractive than brand-name battery users, and felt that they had a lower sense of self-worth.

Across both studies, participants had no idea whatsoever that their own self-evaluations were being affected by the products they were using.

Most of us assume that this sort of thing stops in childhood – when being given the less expensive version of the toy, sneakers, or designer jeans you really wanted is a source of embarrassment as well as disappointment.    These studies suggest that as adults, we continue to unconsciously see our own worth to some extent as a function of whether or not we buy, or are given, the “good version” of the products we use.

There is, however, one important exception:  Some people (and I am thinking of my husband here) feel genuinely smart and savvy when using generics instead of brand-names.  They believe that they are getting a product of equal worth for less money, and for them that choice is a source of pride – of greater self-esteem.

So it may be that only when we have to use generic products – when others choose them for us, or when we feel we can’t or shouldn’t pay for the brand-name alternative – that using the “lesser” product makes us feel like a lesser person.


When Optimists Marry Pessimists

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How to understand and appreciate what motivates your partner, and stop fighting over which one of you is really right.

It can be very frustrating when two people who love each other find that they don’t speak the same motivational language. I have met many, many married couples who are fortunate enough to share common goals, but don’t necessarily see those goals in the same way.

It’s particularly common for one person in the relationship to have what psychologists call a promotion focus, meaning that they tend to see their world and their goals in terms of what they can gain, while the other person has more of a prevention focus, seeing their world and goals in terms of what they stand to lose.  In other words, one half of the couple sees success as being about achievement, aspirations, reaching for the stars and being your best, while the other defines success as fulfilling your obligations, avoiding danger and mistakes, and being the kind of person others can really count on.

In my new book, SUCCEED: How We Can Reach Our Goals, I spend a lot of time focusing on this difference because it affects so much about how we think, feel, and what motivates us.  Promotion-minded people are usually optimists – thinking about what can be gained in any situation helps them to more comfortably embrace risk, and they are motivated by confidence and praise.  They work quickly, creatively, and they take chances.  They make lots of mistakes (relative to the prevention-minded, that is), but never miss an opportunity to win big.

Prevention-minded people are more realistic, even pessimistic – thinking about what they might lose in any situation makes them want to avoid risk like the plague, always choosing the bird in the hand over two in the bush.  They are, in fact, more motivated and energized by criticism than by praise (which they often don’t trust).  There’s nothing like the possibility of failure to get their motivational juices flowing.  They work deliberately, carefully, and accurately.  They plan ahead, and rarely procrastinate.  They may not seize every opportunity, but they are far better at avoiding disaster.

Married couples often waste a lot of energy, and create a lot of unnecessary animosity in their relationship, arguing over which person is seeing things the “right” way.  (Early in our marriage, my husband and I were constantly butting heads when it came to our toddlers’ budding ability to walk.  He wanted to give them opportunities to climb and explore, while I wanted to wrap them in bubble wrap from head to toe and make them wear helmets on the staircase.   You can easily guess which one of us is promotion-minded, and which one is all about prevention.)

Once you realize that you and your partner simply approach your goals differently, the good news is that you can stop fighting over who is right.  You can more easily see what is valuable about your partner’s viewpoint, appreciate what they are bringing to the table, and start speaking to each other in one another’s motivational language. The very best partnerships strike a balance between promotion and prevention, since both are necessary for living a healthy, satisfying life.  Between the two of you, you’ll make sure that your family has adventures and new experiences, while also making sure the kids have clean underwear and the bills get paid.

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