What pizza and cookies can teach us about goal-setting.
Goal-setting can be a handy way of improving performance, except when we fall foul of a nasty little side-effect.
Take dieting as an example. Let's say you've set yourself a daily calorie limit. You manage to keep to this for a few days until one evening after work, your colleagues drag you out to a restaurant.
Instead of your healthy meal at home you're faced with a restaurant menu. But things have already gone wrong before the menu arrives. At a bar beforehand you were hungry and ordered a few snacks to share. These, combined with the drinks, have already put you near your daily calorie intake limit.
Then in the restaurant you eat some bread and have a drink while everyone chooses from the menu. You know what you should choose—a salad—but something is edging you towards the steak. You reason that seeing as you're already over the limit it doesn't matter now. What the hell, let's have the steak. So, just as we're getting somewhere with reaching our goal, the whole thing goes out the window in a moment of madness.
The what-the-hell effect isn't just a lack of self-control or momentary lapse; it is directly related to missing a goal. We know this because psychologists have observed the effect in carefully controlled experiments.
