Self-Efficacy and Personal Success

Most of us tend to question ourselves and our capabilities frequently. We often put too much emphasis on our weaknesses without having a good understanding of our strengths. I was watching a short video which asked 50 people one question: “If you could change one thing about your body, what would it be?” The question was simple, but the responses were interesting. The most astonishing thing was that the responses from children and adults differed from each other significantly. Here are some of the responses from adults: “Only one?”, “I would change my forehead, I have a really big forehead”, “I would like to have smaller ears.”, “Definitely, my skin, because I have lots of acne on my skin.”

Now, here are some of the children’s responses: “mmm”, “I could have wings to fly”, “I like my body, actually. I don’t want anything else.” Lots of questions came to my mind after watching the video: why do we as adults have become so picky of ourselves? , do we lose self-confidence as we grow older?, when was the last time that we felt really satisfied with our body, our mind, and enjoyed all the good things we have got in our life?

But, the most important question was that how this lack of self-confidence and self-efficacy can influence our lives. Self-efficacy is related to our judgment about ourselves and our ability to perform well in a particular area. It is a perception that we have about ourselves and what we can or cannot do. In a series of theoretical and empirical studies, Bandura and colleagues found a positive relationship between self-efficacy and performance accomplishment. In addition, they found that self-efficacy can play a significant role in long-term goal commitment and goal achievement: Self percepts of efficacy predict individual’s behavior, their thought patterns, and their emotional reactions in the long run and under taxing situations. People with high levels of self-efficacy exert more effort and persist longer in the face of difficulties. Therefore, they are more likely to surpass insurmountable barriers that occur in the way of their desired goals.

Considering the importance of self-efficacy in successful performance accomplishment, it is highly critical to find ways to boost one’s self-efficacy. However, too much self-efficacy can also backfire, especially if it is not based on actual personal capabilities. It can make us too confident about ourselves, so we stop expending effort towards building capabilities that are required for achieving our desired goals. In fact, high levels of self-efficacy during the goal planning phase will result in overconfidence bias. In this case,the individuals will allocate fewer resources towards the goal because they believe it can be achieved easily (e.g., requires few resources). In addition, overconfident people may expose themselves more to tempting situations that override their long-term goals (Nordgren et al., 2009). For example, they might choose to work with a television or take “a quick break” to have a drink with friends instead of focusing on their long-term goals. Thus, may be the first step for us is to find where on the self-efficacy continuum we are, before deciding whether we should increase or decrease our self-efficacy in order to realize our longed-for dreams!

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(Trick yourself into eating less by changing the color of your plates.)

We often procrastinate because outside distractions interfere with our long-term goals. We make plans to exercise or to diet but find our attention irresistibly drawn toward attractions like the television or the candy bowl. When temptation strikes, our willpower works overtime to try and drive the unhealthy / distracting cravings out of our head, or at least to stop us from acting on them. It doesn’t have to be this hard, though. In fact, it doesn’t have to be hard at all.

Outside distractions—what science calls environmental cues—activate our emotional limbic system, or System One. Since the time I started to write The Procrastination Equation, about a dozen other books have come out highlighting exactly this process, like Willpower by Roy F. Baumeister and John Tierney or Thinking Fast or Slow by Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman. As all these books confirm, environmental cues initiate mindless habits or distracting thoughts. The smell of popcorn as you enter a movie theatre, for example, is an olfactory cue that gets you to think about eating or initiates a well-rehearsed script that ends with you munching on a super-sized and superbly high-calorie bag of “buttery” kernels. Hopefully, however, your brain’s System Two, the seat of willpower, comes into play before you cede to temptation. Like a brake competing with an accelerator, we try to override our urges and stop obsessing, stop buying, or, failing that, stop consuming what we bought. Wouldn’t it be easier to stop the cues that started this all in the first place? You may not be able to control the cues in the movie theatre, but at home it is a different story.

I am a big fan of Dr. Brian Wansink, who runs the Food and Brand Lab at Cornell University. He tracks the connection between environmental cues and the amount we eat. He has conducted a wide range of studies on this theme, and shown that what we put into our mouths is often completely mindless, ruled by external cues rather than internal desires. It is a great lesson in the power of stimulus control; if we can influence what we smell, touch, or hear (stimuli), we can control our deepest urges.

In my book, I described Dr. Wansink’s research on how plate size cues portion size. Whatever size of plate we choose, we tend to fill it. Consequently, if we shrink the diameters of our plates from 12 inches to 10 inches, we reduce the amount of food we eat by 22 percent. For most of us, this is all the reduction in eating we need to maintain or obtain a slender figure. And it can all be done effortlessly.

Recently, Dr. Wansink allied with Koert Van Ittersum to add another twist to his dishware detectivery. The two researchers explored the contrast effect. Dividing a group of eaters into two, they gave one section a white plate and the other a red plate. People from each section got to serve themselves a meal with red sauce or a white sauce, specifically pasta with either tomato or Alfredo sauce on top. When the plate contrasted with the food, a white plate with tomato sauce or a red plate with Alfredo sauce, the pasta was more visible—an environmental cue that made the hungry people aware of just how much they were piling on. As with smaller plates, the eaters served themselves and consumed 22 percent less food.

The optical illusion Wansink and Van Ittersum are exploiting is called the Delboeuf Illusion, after the Belgian scientist who discovered it 150 years ago, and their paper, published in the Journal of Consumer Research, is entitled “Plate Size and Color Suggestibility: The Delboeuf Illusion’s Bias on Serving and Eating Behavior.” It’s an appropriate name; Delboeuf is French for “Of the beef,” precisely the food we are looking to avoid if we want to reduce our meat intake to the recommended serving size of 3.3 ounces, about the size of a pack of cards.

And how can you make use of the Delboeuf illusion? Start by getting a few sets of dishes in the same color as the vegetables you tend to buy. Use the smaller plate for yourself and the smallest one for your kids. Taking a quick look online, you can get a four-piece dishware set in an array of vegetable colors for as little as $17 a set. For a family of four, you are looking at an investment of $68—get four sets in lettuce green and another four in carrot orange for a total of $136. You will naturally and effortlessly serve yourself more vegetables and eat less of food in other colors.

Amazingly simple and effective. Even better, the basic principles go far beyond just food. In my book, I’ve talked about how similar stimulus control techniques can do more than just help you lose weight but affect everything else, from getting to you to save money to buckle down to work. Given how powerful cues are, why aren’t they used more? Well they are actually, an incredible amount—just not by you. Every time you find yourself eating when you are already full, spending when you are already deeply in debt, and indulging in every vice the Internet can offer while your own life goals lay languishing, there is probably a manufactured cue involved. You are acting to an agenda, one designed by others. However, if you read this far, you know the secret. Just believe it yourself and tell others about it.

Now if I just had a cue to get you started.

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From the beginning, science and procrastination have been intertwined. Consider Leonardo Da Vinci. Five hundred years ago, he designed or sketched the submarine, the helicopter, and the armored tank as well as more everyday inventions such as the alarm clock, the snorkel, and the robot. In science, he made significant contributions to dozens of fields, from astronomy to anatomy, and developed a rudimentary version of today’s basic scientific method. His artistic endeavors are equally as notable. His paintings are renowned for their intrigue and beauty, with The Last Supper and The Mona Lisa as two of the most recognizable works of art in the world.

Unfortunately, Da Vinci’s genius was tempered by procrastination. He never took the time to publish his findings. From the evidence of the notebooks that survive, if even a fraction of Da Vinci’s discoveries or insights had made it into the public domain when he was alive, science could have been advanced by an era (i.e., imagine if we had next century’s technology today). It was he who first surmised that “The earth is not in the centre of the Sun’s orbit nor at the centre of the universe.” As for his art, he only fully finished between five to ten paintings, often requiring a sharp threat by his patrons that they were about to withhold payment. The Mona Lisa took over 15 years for him to finish. Worse was The Virgin of the Rocks, commissioned by the Church of San Francesco Grande with a seven-month deadline. Da Vinci finished it 25 years later. Describing Da Vinci as a distractible, doodling scatterbrain, even Pope Leo X exclaimed “This man will never accomplish anything! He thinks of the end before the beginning.” However, the most damning condemnation comes from Da Vinci himself, who apologized on his deathbed “to God and Man for leaving so much undone.”

Now consider Leonardo Da Vinci’s contemporary, Nicolaus Copernicus, who together are attributed with laying the foundation for modern science and art. Like Da Vinci, Copernicus suffered from the same vice of procrastination. For a decade, Copernicus left unpublished his revolutionary book De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium, which formally placed the sun at the center of the solar system. If it wasn’t for an admiring mathematics professor, Georg Joachim Rheticus, who coaxed him to publish this masterpiece, his book on the sun may never have seen light.

Has anything changed over the better half of a millennia? I received this email from Marco Castellano, an Italian astronomer of the present day.

One of the main duties in our field is submitting “proposals for observations”, technical documents through which we ask for observing time at telescopes. Indeed, since telescopes and instruments are very expensive, they are not owned by one institution only but are shared among various universities, institutes etc.: to obtain observations (i.e. images of the sky at a given wavelength in most cases) we must submit proposals and wait for a panel to select the (few) best ones that will be carried out. Of course we have deadlines within which these proposals have to be submitted, e.g., the end of February for the Hubble Space Telescope, the end of March for the observatories of the European ESO consortium etc.

We all know that these deadlines are fixed and, in principle, we could start preparing proposals months ahead of time and submit them as soon as the “call for proposals” are issued by observatories (30 days before the usual deadline). However, it happens that most, if not all, the proposals are submitted in the last few hours or minutes before the deadline, and a lot of my colleagues spend the last nights at work to finish them! Sometimes proposals are even lost because the web traffic is so huge that we can’t submit them, thus losing days (and nights) of work. As an example, this paragraph is written in the last “call for proposals” document of the European Southern Observatory: “Plan ahead! Over past periods, congestion of the proposal submission system has repeatedly occurred in the last few hours before the proposal deadline, leading to delays in response time that occasionally exceeded 1 hour. Try to submit proposals at least one day before the deadline and avoid last-minute stress.”

I would venture that it is no different than in any other scientific field. This month, I submitted to the Academy of Management conference a few papers on national culture and national happiness (exciting stuff I hope to share with you soon). Knowing human nature, I stayed up late the night before to get one final paper submitted. Others who waited the day of submission were not so lucky. The crush of last minute applications melted down the conference servers and we will never know what they intended to share. Apparently, studying human nature doesn’t necessarily mean rising above it, just as heart surgeons can still have heart attacks.

Finally, if you start assessing the level of procrastination by scholarly profession, which I did, you find that while Economists procrastinate less than Clinical Psychologists, who are in turn better than Sociologists, none of us are that good at being on time. Indeed, the majority of academic colleagues are beyond late in writing their own research papers, included a few of them who are, now more in theory than practice, my co-authors. We have even done research directly upon selves, asking how we can get stuff done, such as Boice’s “Procrastination, busyness and bingeing,” which was attempt to help new faculty members actually write.

In all, it means that science is progressing somewhat slower than you would expect. For example, the 1982 classic Blade Runner, voted favorite SciFi film by scientists, has genetically engineered organic robots filling the streets by 2019. I don’t think it’s going to happen on schedule and procrastination is probably to blame. However, there may be a happy ending to all this. Despite centuries of delay, we now do have a solid scientific of why we procrastinate and what to do about it. As these ideas and self-control techniques eventually spread (all handily available in book form), we might get our army of replicants after all. Or, at the very least, perhaps Off-World colonies, attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion, and C-beams glittering in the dark near the Tannhauser Gate.

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• Adler, R. (2002). Science firsts: From the creation of science to the science of creation. New York: Wiley.
• Boice, R. (1989). Procrastination, busyness and bingeing. Behaviour Research & Therapy, 27(6), 605-611.
• Pannapacker, W. A. (2009). How to procrastinate like Leonardo Da Vinci. The Chronicle of Higher Education, 55(24), B4.

Procrastination has been mostly oversimplified as laziness. But there’s more to it than poor time management. It is a psychologically complex phenomenon that can affect all aspects of our everyday life, including our health, relationship, and work. In fact, most of the time, we procrastinate in order to temporarily elevate our mood. When we procrastinate, we get a short-term good feeling just because we think we can do the task tomorrow.

There has been a long debate regarding the source of procrastination: Is procrastination a fault of our environment? Or is it a built-in trait?

Some researchers argue that procrastination is not hereditary, but a by-product of our environment and the way we have grown up: For example, we never got rewarded for doing our homework early in school. There’s no incentive for doing tasks ahead of time.

However, my research on procrastination and later research in this area have shown that we can inherit procrastination. In other words, genetics can play an important role in our procrastination habits. Delaying things may be a product of our own evolution. Our willpower never had to resist environmental temptations for such a long period of time.

Living in the present had an evolutionary advantage. It enabled us to do the required tasks urgently. Our ancestors used to fight, flee, feed or mate when they felt the urge. It was the best strategy to react impulsively instead of making long-term plans.

Procrastination is a struggle between two parts of our brain: The prefrontal cortex, the region that controls planning and problem solving, and the limbic system, our “inner child” that wants immediate gratification. As a deadline approaches, urgency eventually persuades the limbic system to cooperate with the prefrontal cortex, and we get to work.

But in today’s world, self-control is more useful than impulsiveness. Conscientiousness, a basic personality trait that governs our self-control and motivation, can win the war between the prefrontal cortex and the limbic system.

In one study, a team of researchers in the University of Colorado, Boulder examined the genetic roots of procrastination, impulsiveness, and goal-setting. They found that genetics played a sizable role in procrastination, even when controlling for environmental factors like growing up in the same household. Based on this study, the overall variation in procrastination among people is around 50 percent due to their genetic influences, and 50 percent due to environmental influences. In addition, the results showed that procrastination and impulsivity are linked primarily through genetic influences on goal setting and prioritizing goals to effectively regulate actions.

The results of this research are published in the Journal of Psychological Science. However, the type of genes that are responsible for these traits is still unknown, and should be further studied.

Even if procrastinating is in your DNA, it’s possible to decrease the habit. However, it takes time and practice. Precommitting to goals, like automatically deducting from your paycheck to a savings account, can help. You can also schedule your hardest tasks for the time of day when you have the most energy.

Blocking out distractions is another important strategy. By removing the audio alert of a new message, you can substantially reduce the number of visits to email, Twitter, or Facebook. While these techniques can help us in getting tasks done on-time, we will still put things off occasionally.The above-mentioned studies showed that procrastination can be hereditary. But, don’t get frustrated and give up on your efforts to get your tasks done, blaming it on your genes.

As a person with procrastination-prone genes and frequent internet distractions, I have been able to defeat my genes by meeting my deadlines! So, hopefully you will be able to do it as well.

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http://www.pbs.org/newshour/updates/reporter-turns-article-procrastination-time/

Gustavson, D. E., Miyake, A., Hewitt, J. K., & Friedman, N. P. (2014). Genetic Relations Among Procrastination, Impulsivity, and Goal-Management Ability Implications for the Evolutionary Origin of Procrastination. Psychological science, 0956797614526260.

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So how is your diet going? Chances are you are on one or that there is a diet in your future. The majority of Americans think about dieting all year round, with as many as 41 percent on a diet at any given time, in an attempt to lose an average of thirty-seven pounds. Britons aren’t far behind: about a third are constantly on a diet. The statistics for the rest of Europe, even France, are similar. We all seem to have a few pounds or kilograms to lose and have trouble doing it.

Let me see if I can pique your interest in a helpful idea. Right now, we all know what we need to do to shed the weight: eat less and exercise more. No mystery here. The problem, then, isn’t with our knowledge but our ability to put this knowledge into action. We try to eat less, to get to the gym, but we can’t find the motivation to follow through. Resigning ourselves to our predicament, we end up looking for the easy but probably ineffective, like the fad diets from dubious Internet advertisements. This makes it a mental issue, not a physical one, and since the source of our problems are in our minds, so will be the solution.

Everything is created twice, first mentally and then physically. First comes belief and then comes action.  However, if the belief isn’t nurtured, and more importantly, shaped in a very particular fashion, the actions won’t follow. There are two mental tricks that you need to master. These techniques require precision. Get the details wrong, and they will backfire and actually work against you.

The mind’s imagination can play two roles. One is a call to action, to change belief into reality. The other is fantasy, to allow us to gain satisfaction and enjoyment from afar by simply imagining what it would be like. The first helps with getting stuff done. The second replaces getting stuff done. We will need to use both in our efforts to lose weight.

The first method, the call to action, I’ve written about before in “The Motivational Wisdom of Lady Gaga versus The Secret.” To acquire the motivation to act, you mentally contrast where you are right now after first imagining where you want to be. Note the order of that, first you fantasize about being the ideal weight and then you reflect on the weight you are now. Here’s a walkthrough from my book The Procrastination Equation:

Mentally capture that feeling of vigor that will infuse your body and all the activities you’ll engage in with friends and family, once you’re in shape. As a parent, for example, it might be playing with your kids again. Now contrast that with where you are now. You are tired and rubbery, spending far too much time in front of the TV. Doesn’t feel good, does it? But it does make you want to do something about it.

So first you think about the positives and how virtuous you are going to feel from working out, how slender and enviable you are going to look by eating smaller portions and exercising more. Then you will contrast that feeling with the guilt and frustration you feel by doing nothing. Do just the positive fantasizing and often that’s all what you end up doing.

The second method is from a recent Science article by Morewedge, Huh, and Vosgerau, titled “Thought for food: Imagine consumption reduces actual consumption.” In a productive way, they exploit the fact that fantasy can take the place of action. Instead of having people fantasize about having lost weight, which would ultimately hurt their dieting efforts, they had them vividly imagine themselves eating a bowl of chocolate M&M’s, thirty of them to be precise. As per their title, imagining consuming a treat can take the place of the treat itself. Those who took the time to fantasize about a chocolate indulgence actually ate fewer M&M’s when a real bowl was presented to them. The trick here is to pay attention to the degree of fantasy. You didn’t get the effect when people imagined eating only three M&Ms; it wasn’t enough to satiate. You had to imagine all thirty of them.

So the next time you have a main course to order, imagine how great you will feel by choosing the healthy option. Then follow that up with reflecting on how lousy you will feel if you went with the high-fat status quo. And for dessert, imagine eating it, mouthful by mouthful, taking the time to visualize each bite. For a cheesecake or an ice cream parfait, that’s 15 to 20 loving spoonfuls. With the right degree of fantasy, you are on your way to be at the weight you always wanted for yourself.

Morewedge, C. K., Huh, Y. E., & Vosgerau, J. (2011). Thought for food: Imagine consumption reduces actual consumption. Science, 330, `530-1533.

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