I gave a talk on psychology and the quitting process at Skeptech 2013 this past April. Below is the video (apologies for the poor audio quality), and following is the full, annotated transcript with paper citations.
“So I’m going to be giving a new talk, sort of an experiment that I put together for this
conference.It’s called “Dislodging Your Brain”, and I’ll be talking about cases where you’re trying to quit or coming to that decision.
**Just a brief content note before we get going – there will be a short discussion of depression and scientific descriptions of suicide a little while later in the talk. So just be aware.**
So quitting is something that we all fantasize about at one time or another, and many of you are probably thinking about quitting something right now – be it a job, a class, maybe being a parent (but you can’t really quit that one).
How many of you have ever quit something you thought was very dear and close to you? Now, keep your hands up – how many of you had serious difficulties rationalizing taking that leap? Almost everyone.
The goal of this talk is to unpack some of the rhetoric and ingrained habits we and our society have with calling it quits. And to look at how addressing the “should I stay or should I go” question affects our health and how to get over our cognitive hurdles.
So what does society say about quitting?
It says many things, one of which is that blind persistence is good. Time and time again we’re taught that quitting is really not an option, that we can’t do it. Calvin Coolidge, the 30th President of the United States, said, “Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful people with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan ‘press on’ has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.” We also hear about the American Dream - political rhetoric fetishizes sticking to your guns, never wavering from your goals, never giving up. This is perhaps a symptom of our hyper-individualistic culture, where individual persistence is valued over saying “I can’t do this” and risking failure. And we also overwork to get ahead - our culture not only overworks, but almost fetishizes being constantly “busy.” If you’re not always working on a project, or earning money, or political capital, etc. then you are not expending enough effort and are not at your full economic potential.
So quitting is posited as a sign of weakness, that strong, resilient people never shift goals or abandon projects into which they’ve sunk perhaps years of effort. Of course, this is patently false - Robert Reich, secretary of labor under the first Clinton administration and proponent of the family/medical leave act, who was named one of the 10 best cabinet members of 20th century by Time Magazine, quit his job. Mid-term. People shift goals and paths all the time.
How does science discuss quitting?
It discusses quitting in terms of things like goal management, comprised of goal disengagement – the process of removing yourself from moving towards a goal, and goal reengagement – shifting your faculties and efforts towards a new goal. Now these things don’t necessarily have to occur together – they can occur one by one, simultaneously, or sequentially [n.b. and are not necessarily paired]. And many systems in biology are co-regulated by competing opposing processes, particularly in genetics – of which this is not an example, but it’s a good analogy. The interplay of high & low ability levels of these in certain demographics can severely complicate the process of goal management, as we’ll see later.
And the quitting process itself can be broken into two simple stages – removing personal investment, and removing productive investment. Many people who have difficulty actually abandoning projects get stuck between these two stages – they’ve lost most, or all, their personal investment and interest, but fail to remove productive investment due to cognitive biases – so they just keep trudging along, even though they don’t want to do something anymore. And lastly, unattainable goals are of course goals that have become very difficult if not impossible to achieve.
What are the possible health benefits of quitting?
People who can disengage from unattainable and inappropriate goals have better wellbeing, more normative cortisol levels, fewer everyday illnesses, and give themselves the opportunity to rally their faculties and reengage in new goals. Here’s how we know:
Two researchers6 in 2007 followed 54 adults to measure daily cortisol secretion levels (stress hormone) and monitored their goal disengagement ability (self-reported). They found that difficulty with GDE was significantly associated with a steeper diurnal cortisol rhythm – more drastic up and down movements in their cortisol levels during daytime, which is bad for health.
These same researchers in the same year, published another study2 following 90 female adolescents over a course of 1 year, and measured blood concentration levels of the inflammatory C-reactive protein at 0, 6, and 12 months. They also measured capabilities for managing unattainable goals. They found that subjects who had difficulty disengaging had higher CRP levels – staying in stressful situations longer correlates with higher physiological stress levels.
It was also found that disengagement is a significant predictor of CRP trajectory over the course of the experiment after depression was controlled for, and the level of this interaction was such that each 1-standard deviation increase in persistence equated to a 0.15 mg/L increase in CRP levels.
Additionally, in a 2003 review5 by one of the authors, one of the mentioned studies found that goal disengagement and reengagement ability each independently related to low levels of perceived stress, low levels of intrusive thoughts, and high levels of self-mastery.
And of course, previous research had focused on how persistence maximizes the probability of goal attainment and is therefore adaptive (Bandura, 1997; Taylor & Brown, 1988), but this neglects the adaptive nature of optimization, of shifting yourself around and finding the best path for yourself.
Adolescents are actively engaged in forming their identities, and so actively sampling different facets and identities can be adaptive for adolescents, which involves quitting things. But if an adolescent, who has an “incomplete” or partially-formed identity, has severe difficulty in disengaging from one thing through which they gain self-definition, then the sampling process is stunted.
And here is where I’m going to talk a little about suicide and how it relates to goal management (or mismanagement). A researcher at the University of Stirling, UK, named Rory O’Connor, in 2012 published a paper3 in the Journal of Affective Disorders. They monitored 237 patients who were hospitalized after a suicide attempt. They were assessed at baseline for depression, anxiety, hopelessness, suicidal ideation, and goal regulation (reengagement and disengagement). The authors used the below model, the integrated motivational-volitional model, to propose that perceptions of perceptions of defeat and entrapment represent the final common pathway to attempting suicide.
Now it’s established that goal regulation deficits are characteristic of suicide attempters – in people who suffer from depression and suicidal ideation, getting stuck in unattainable goal situations can foster feelings of hopelessness, and that’s what helps lead people to try to take these actions.
And evolutionarily, continuing down losing paths is disadvantageous – humans have created false value in unwavering persistence, and goal disengagement avoids continuing feelings of failure, as long as you have some viable alternatives.
And here is a pretty good visual summary of their results:
40.9% of subjects were re-admitted to hospital; 62% of these were admitted within 6 months. They found univariate predictors (which is a single-variable predictor) of repeat self-harm: past history of self-harm, hospitalization, baseline suicidal ideation and the capacity to reengage in goals. If that ability was stunted, that was a univariate predictor of repeat self-harm. Now multivariate interactions are what’s actually really interesting here. For young people on the left, this dashed line represents the significant interaction of high disengagement and low reengagement – the combination of these two is a predictor of self-harm. But for older people it’s reversed – the high interaction here was low disengagement, so for older people who have low disengagement ability, if they have difficulty reengaging, that is a predictor of self-harm. So goal disengagement is not universally adaptive, it’s confounded by things like age.
What are the cognitive biases that we face when trying to deal with these kinds of situations?
The primary logical fallacy or bias that governs how bad humans are at adaptive goal disengagement is of course the sunk cost fallacy – not quitting when you should, just because you’ve invested a lot of time and/or money in something. But just how bad at it are we? Hal Arkes (Ohio University) & Peter Ayton (City University, London) in 1999 compared lower primates1 & children to adult humans in how likely they are to abandon certain investments as a function of prior investment. The analogous fallacy in lower animals is called the Concorde fallacy, named after the infamous failed transatlantic jet. The authors found no unambiguous instances of the Concorde fallacy in lower primates in their literature review, and also found that children exhibit more “correct” economic behavior as well, so children don’t fall prey to this. But we do. So where do we go wrong? Adults overgeneralize the “don’t waste” rule, while only currently relevant costs & benefits should influence decisions. Our personal responsibility exacerbates this effect.
Another bias we face is the self-justification bias. We don’t want to be wrong, so we’ll avoid admitting a bad decision and keep investing in failed projects just so we don’t have to admit defeat, or admit to a bad initial investment. And additionally, we face a lot of social pressure to keep on target and be consistent. So in this case, our capacity for abstract thought and reasoning actually hinders our economic potential and efficiency.
How do we overcome these biases?
We’re really bad at making that judgment call of went to throw in the towel. How do we mitigate our own higher reasoning? Forget about sunk costs - force yourself to only consider opportunity costs, present investment, and potential future gains. Focus on the data of the situation as much as possible.
Emphasize self-honesty over making excuses to avoid being wrong. Recognizing an investment was a bad idea, and redirecting your efforts, is a good first step to not sucking at quitting.
We should define ourselves not by the concrete methodologies we use and tasks we complete, but by the passions that govern what we do. Because then if we switch up exactly what we’re invested in, we’ll feel less as though we’re leaving a part of ourselves behind. And keeping our passions consistent but our implementations of those passions fluid gives us agency.
And perhaps most importantly, take emotional stock of yourself. We’ve seen that if you have trouble quitting a losing struggle, or a bad investment, and you have depression or other mental illness which amplifies mental and physiological stress factors, that misplaced persistence can be exceedingly maladaptive – potentially influencing repeated self-harm. If you have a limited supply of spoons, be careful how many you give away.
A good friend of mine nearly 10 years ago out east in Boston, suffered a traumatic brain injury from a car accident while studying biology and computer science in college, and it for several years stripped her of the capability to maintain many of her commitments – to this day, she has to expend many times more cognitive effort to accomplish perhaps 80% of her former cognitive self. But this taught her that the internal growth and consistency of passions is much more important than specific goals – as she now has resumed academic study in the field of neuroscience.
Things not to say to potential quitters:
One of the most common things I hear from people weighing large decisions – decisions by which they define large portions of themselves – is that they fear the judgment of others for having self doubt. Grad students, post-docs, honors undergraduate students, even professors – to stick to the academic analogy – I have read or heard from all of these people that the thing they fear the most is negative judgment. Being cast out, rejected, and labeled as a failure.
So if that person has a history of self-harm that you’re not aware of, what do you think your judgment could be promoting?
Beyond rote negative judgment, here are some other things you shouldn’t say:
- “But doing this will get you a fantastic job!”
- “But you’re so smart, you’d be perfect for this!”
- “You should stick it out because you’re meant for it.”
Instead, ask questions, give them agency, and prod their brains a little bit – people in these transitional situations want a chance to explain their doubts and rationale without judgment. Note the potential health benefits of quitting if you know their stress levels are high. Ask & offer ideas of how to reengage in alternative goals.
I know what struggling, stressed-out quitters don’t like to hear, because I was one. Many of you know I moved from Minneapolis to Boston to pursue a PhD & career in computational neuroscience. The attempt lasted one semester. I won’t stand here and justify my decision to all of you, but what I needed most (and received, thanks to the many wonderful, loving people in my life) during that time was emotional support, suggestions of alternative paths, and to be given agency to my own thoughts.
And what I feared the most was being labeled a failure, unable to follow through with commitments. So be mindful of what you say to people whom you know are considering leaving large goals behind for new ones. And care for your own inner quitter – sometimes letting it guide you is the adaptive decision to make, despite what society and professional sports players might tell us.
W. C. Fields put it simply: “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. Then quit. There’s no point in being a damn fool about it.”
Thank you.”
Sources
- Arkes, H. R. & Ayton, P. The Sunk Cost and Concorde Effects: Are Humans Less Rational Than Lower Animals? Psychological Bulletin. 1999. Vol. 125, No. 5, 591-600.
- Miller, G. E. & Wrosch, C. You’ve Gotta Know When to Fold ‘Em: Goal Disengagement and Systemic Inflammation in Adolescence. Psychological Science. 2007. Vol. 18, No. 9.
- O’Connor et al. Self-regulation of unattainable goals in suicide attempters: a two-year prospective study. Journal of Affective Disorders. Sept. 2012. Vol. 142, 248-255.
- Reynolds, J. R., & Baird, C. L. Is There a Downside to Shooting for the Stars? Unrealized educational expectations and symptoms of depression. American Sociological Review. 2010. Vol. 75, No. 1: 151-172.
- Wrosch et al. Adaptive Self-Regulation of Unattainable Goals: Goal Disengagement, Goal Reengagement, and Subjective Well-Being. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. 2003. Vol. 29: 1494.
- Wrosch et al. Giving Up on Unattainable Goals: Benefits for Health? Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. 2007. Vol. 33: 251.
