Whether we are shifting between responding to emails, working on homework or scrolling through social media, we often find ourselves having to quickly change the goal we are trying to achieve. But a recent UC Berkeley Psychology study found that switching between goals like this can actually make you worse at achieving each one.
In a new paper published in the journal Psychological Review, led by Researchers Ivan Grahek and Xiamin Leng, Psychology Professor Amitai Shenhav and colleagues, found that when people change the goal they’re working toward – such as going from trying to be fast to trying to be accurate – it takes the brain time to adjust. While this adjustment is taking place, performance can take a hit.
They discovered that each time you switch to a new goal, your brain undergoes a process of transitioning from the previous mental state to the new one. During that transition, you’re not fully focused on either goal.
“Our work shows that there is a price to pay each time a person jumps from one goal to another, even when the task they are performing hasn’t changed,” Professor Shenhav said.
In their study, the researchers asked people to perform a challenging cognitive task, with goals that changed over the course of the experiment. Participants did the same task over and over, but were told to focus on speed sometimes and accuracy other times. The task didn’t change – just the goal. Each of these goal changes forced the participant to shift gears into a new mindset.
“You can think of this like the difference between responding to an email from a friend and responding to an email from your boss,” Grahek said. “While your actions might be similar in both cases, you will likely focus more and take more time formulating the reply to your boss than to your friend.”
The researchers found that when people switch goals quickly, their brains may still be stuck in the mindset of the last goal. For instance, if you just switched from trying to be precise to trying to be fast, your brain might still be in “accuracy mode,” making it harder to achieve the new goal. When there’s less time to make the switch, performance under the new goal will suffer more.
Their study shows that if you have to rapidly shift between meeting different goals – you are going to end up only adjusting part way each time. The difference between adjusting your mental state all the way to where you would like it to be and adjusting it only partially is what they call a “control adjustment cost.” It is the cost you pay – in terms of meeting your current goal – by having come from trying to achieve a different goal. Their study suggests you are better off continuing to perform the task in the same way than making that adjustment.
The researchers revealed that it takes work to adjust to a different mental state, likening it to the notion of inertia from physics, which asserts that you need to apply a force in order to move an object that is standing still or moving in the wrong direction.
“If we think of mental states as also needing some kind of push in order to move from one configuration to another, then this means that we can predict where we will end up along that trajectory depending on the time we have and the mental space we need to traverse,” Grahek said. “With unlimited time, we will always get to the mental state we want. But the less time we have the more likely we will be to only make it part of the way to our target state.”
From the classroom to the workplace, the Berkeley researchers’ findings uncover how our work can suffer when having to jump between different goals. To work more effectively, it’s better to group similar goals together rather than bouncing between different tasks.
