If you want to achieve a goal, make sure you share your goal with the right person. In a new set of studies, researchers found that people showed greater goal engagement and achievement when they told their goal to someone they believed had a higher status than themselves. It didn't help people at all to tell their goals to someone they thought had a lower status, or to keep their goals to themselves.
In one study, the researchers found that working adults often share their personal career goals, and their commitment to achieving those goals was greater when those goals were shared with someone of higher status.
In another study, 171 undergraduates sat at computers and were told to move a slider on the screen to the number 50 as many times as possible within the allotted time. After counting how many times they had successfully done this, they had to do it again, but this time they were told to set a goal and write it down.
The experimenter then informed the participants that a lab assistant would come and check their targets. The same person always checked the participants' goals – but there were two different versions of this assistant.
In some cases, the lab assistant was dressed in a suit and introduced himself as a doctoral student in the business school, who was an expert in the current study topic. That was someone who, according to the non-graduates, was a person of a higher status than himself.
For other participants, the same lab assistant was dressed in casual clothes and introduced herself as a student at a local college who worked part-time at the business school. In this case, the students rated the assistant as lower in status than themselves.
A third group of participants did not share their goals with the lab assistant.
The results showed that participants who shared their goals with the higher-status assistant reported being more committed to achieving the goal they set for themselves than those who told the lower-status assistant.
And in fact, those whose goals were seen by the higher status assistant outperformed the others. Participants who shared their goal with the lower status assistant performed no better than those who didn't tell anyone about their goal.
A third similar study also asked participants about their "evaluation aptitude" — how much they cared about the lab assistant's opinion. The results showed that participants who cared more about what the lab assistant thought of them were more engaged with their goal and more likely to achieve it. In addition, the apprehension of the evaluation was higher when the lab assistant was considered a higher status.
A final, more lengthy study surveyed 292 college students over the course of an entire semester. The participants set challenging end goals at the beginning of the semester and shared them. As in the other studies, students who told people of higher status about their goal showed more goal engagement and were more likely to reach their target audience than students who told people of lower status.
