Soda or Water After a Good Week: Fishbach and Dhar on Goal Progress

Picture the set-up. It is the first week of January, and a researcher is recruiting students in the lobby of a large university gym. Each person fills in a survey about their workouts, rates some statements about what exercise means to them, and is then offered a thank-you gift to take home: a can of sugared soda or a bottle of springwater. None of the 165 participants in this study, run at the University of Chicago, guessed what it was really about.

The result, reported in When Thinking Beats Doing (Zhang, Fishbach and Dhar, Journal of Consumer Research, December 2007), is that the same optimistic thoughts about the year ahead pushed some students toward water and others toward soda. What decided it was how they had been prompted to read their own plans. That finding belongs to a line of work that starts with an earlier paper by Fishbach and Ravi Dhar, and it bears on why a good week so often precedes a bad one.

What did Fishbach and Dhar actually find in 2005?

Ayelet Fishbach (then at the University of Chicago) and Ravi Dhar (Yale) published “Goals as Excuses or Guides: The Liberating Effect of Perceived Goal Progress on Choice” in the Journal of Consumer Research, volume 32, issue 3, December 2005, pages 370 to 377. The abstract, as indexed on RePEc, says that across four studies, perceived progress on a focal goal reduced pursuit of it, that “progress along one goal liberates people to pursue inconsistent goals”, and that simply planning to make progress later could lead to choices that conflict with the goal in the present.

I could not open the 2005 paper. It sits behind a paywall, and ResearchGate returned an access error. What I have is the abstract plus the way two other sources describe it. Kelly McGonigal, a Stanford health psychologist, summarised the research in a December 2011 Psychology Today piece adapted from The Willpower Instinct. She reports that dieters who were reminded of how much progress they had made toward their ideal weight were then offered an apple or a chocolate bar as a thank-you, and that 85% of the reminded group chose chocolate versus 58% of those who were not reminded. Those percentages come through McGonigal, not through my reading of the paper, so treat them as second-hand.

The same piece mentions students who felt good about their exam preparation and were then more likely to spend the evening playing beer pong. McGonigal does not name the study behind it, and I found no source naming one, so I would not repeat it as a finding. It illustrates the idea, nothing more.

A term is attached to all of this: goal liberation is the loosening of a goal’s hold on your choices once you feel you have made enough progress on it.

Why would progress make you want to quit?

Fishbach’s account is that people hold several goals at once, such as health, pleasure, career and family, and any single choice can serve one at the expense of another. A goal that feels well served stops pulling as hard. The paper’s title gives the two roles: a goal can act as a guide, steering you toward more of the same, or as an excuse, permitting a detour.

Nothing here is peculiar to dieting. Ongoing goals, as Zhang, Fishbach and Dhar put it, are “rarely fully attained”, like staying in shape or saving for retirement, so there is always room to read yesterday’s effort as enough. That is the setup for licensing.

What did the 2007 experiments change?

The 2007 paper, which I did read in full, added a precise claim. When you look at your own pursuit of a goal, you can read it in two ways. In the commitment frame, what you did shows that you care about the goal, so you do more. In the progress frame, what you did gets you closer to done, so you can ease off.

The researchers manipulated this with agree-or-disagree statements. Progress statements included “having worked out that much, I am closer to my workout objectives” and “I must have really improved my health”. Commitment statements included “I am committed to my workout objectives” and “I must really care about my health”. They were embedded among filler items so the purpose stayed hidden.

Study 1 is the gym lobby. Participants either rated how often they worked out last year or how often they intended to work out this year, then took one of the two sets of statements. Participants did display optimism: the average rating for intended workouts was 5.16 on a seven-point scale, compared with 4.29 for last year’s actual workouts.

The drink choices followed the framing, but only for those thinking about the future:

• Commitment frame, thinking about future workouts: 84% chose water.
• Commitment frame, thinking about past workouts: 66% chose water.
• Progress frame, thinking about past workouts: 65% chose water.
• Progress frame, thinking about future workouts: 48% chose water.

Overall, 75% of the commitment-frame group took water, against 56% of the progress-frame group. The authors call the past-versus-future gap under the progress frame (65% against 48%) directional, not significant. The more reliable pattern is the first pair: optimistic plans, read as commitment, made water more likely, and the same optimism read as progress made it less likely.

Does the size of the optimism matter?

In Study 2, 79 gym-using undergraduates were asked either to visualise the process of a workout session or its completion. Those who pictured finishing planned longer workouts (an average of 1.30 hours against 1.03). Afterwards, in what looked like an unrelated survey, they rated how much they wanted salad, vegetables and fruit against pizza, burgers and fries.

Under the commitment frame, picturing the finished workout raised interest in healthy food (5.53 against 4.93). Under the progress frame, it lowered it (4.03 against 4.71). The authors also checked that the two visualisations did not leave people in different moods, using a separate group of 66 students, and found no difference (4.59 against 4.88).

Study 3 measured these tendencies in people instead of assigning them, partly to rule out the worry that rating commitment or progress statements had pushed participants toward a particular answer. People differ in whether they naturally read their own actions as commitment or as progress, and the authors found that greater optimism raised interest in healthy food among commitment-oriented participants and lowered it among progress-oriented ones. The same plan, held by two different readers of their own effort, pulled in opposite directions. Study 4 used saving money and studying, with 164 students. Those who thought about activities planned for the near future were less interested in goal-congruent action (in z-score units, minus 0.41) than those who thought about what they had actually done recently (0.19). For distant plans, the order flipped: planning far ahead raised interest (0.39) against distant past achievement (minus 0.09). The authors’ reading is that nearby plans feel like progress and faraway plans feel like commitment.

Why does this matter in January?

Study 1 was run at the start of January, when students were being asked about the coming year. A resolution made on the 2nd is an optimistic expectation of the kind the paper studies, and this part is my extension, not the paper’s. If it registers as “I’ve started, I’m on my way”, the study’s pattern suggests the next small choice may tilt toward the indulgent option. If it registers as “this is what I care about”, it tilts the other way. For how quickly resolutions tend to fade, there is a day-by-day look at Quitters’ Day, and optimism about time has its own research in a thesis study of deadlines.

The 2007 paper offers a different way to see it. It notes that people are “unrealistically optimistic” about future goal pursuit and so believe more goal-congruent activity will happen later than happened before. The cost of that optimism is paid in the present choice.

What are the limits of these studies?

The samples are University of Chicago undergraduates, recruited at a gym or in survey sessions, each making one or two decisions in one sitting. The drinks were a bottle of water or a can of soda. Nothing in the 2007 paper measures what these students did over the following weeks.

The effect also needs something to license. Across the 2007 studies, when the pursuit being considered was minimal, as with a thin past record or a cautious forecast, framing did not change the current choice. The authors’ explanation is that there was not enough attainment to support either inference. If you have done nothing yet, there is nothing to cash in.

And Fishbach does not argue against progress. In a 2021 Chicago Booth recap of her talk “Stay Motivated”, progress is described as something that can strengthen commitment or weaken motivation through self-assurance and licensing, with the advice to celebrate progress early to get going and, as the finish nears, to focus on the distance still to go.

What can you do with it?

Four changes follow from the studies, and each is a rewording.

1. Ask the commitment question. After a good week, ask “what does this say about what I care about?” instead of “how far have I come?” McGonigal’s piece makes the same point, contrasting people who are asked how much progress they feel with people who are asked how committed they feel, though she gives no numbers or citation for it.
2. Write down the reason. McGonigal also reports a 2008 study by Mukhopadhyay, Sengupta and Ramanathan: students who recalled a time they resisted temptation took the next chance to indulge 70% of the time, but when they also recalled why they had resisted, 69% resisted. This is her summary and I did not read the original.
3. Be careful with near-term plans. Study 4 suggests that a plan for tomorrow or next week is more likely to read as progress than a plan for next year. A detailed schedule written tonight can feel like work already done. Treat the plan as a promise you have not yet kept.
4. Notice the reward you reach for right after. The licensing in these studies shows up in the very next choice: the drink, the dinner, the evening.

The fourth change is where mornings come in. Setting a 6 a.m. alarm tonight is a plan for the near future, and by Study 4’s logic the satisfaction of having set it could read as progress (my extension, not a tested result). A check on the action itself is a different kind of tool from a good intention. A group chat can fall into the same licensing, because a round of congratulations on the check-in can start to feel like the progress itself; how a friendly group drifts toward lowered standards follows that thread. DontSnooze gives you 30 seconds after the alarm to record a video showing you are up, and sending a random camera-roll photo to friends you picked if you do not. And when a goal has stopped fitting your life, work on dropping unattainable goals looks at when letting go is the better result.

Sources

• Fishbach, A. and Dhar, R. (2005). Goals as Excuses or Guides: The Liberating Effect of Perceived Goal Progress on Choice. Journal of Consumer Research, 32(3), 370-377 (abstract read via RePEc).
• Zhang, Y., Fishbach, A. and Dhar, R. (2007). When Thinking Beats Doing: The Role of Optimistic Expectations in Goal-Based Choice. Journal of Consumer Research, 34(4), starting on page 567 (full text read).
• McGonigal, K. (2011). The Problem with Progress. Psychology Today, The Science of Willpower, 11 December 2011 (adapted from The Willpower Instinct).
• Chicago Booth Roman Family Center, recap of Ayelet Fishbach’s “Stay Motivated” webinar, 18 February 2021.