Willpower: Rediscovering Our Greatest Strength

by Roy F. Baumeister

For decades, psychologists have been debating the merits of proximal goals (which are short-term objectives) versus distal goals (which are long-term objectives). One of the classic experiments was conducted by Albert Bandura, a legendary figure in the field (one survey of citations ranked him in fourth place behind Freud, Skinner, and Piaget). He and Dale Schunk studied children between the ages of seven and ten who were having difficulty with math. The children took a course featuring self-directed learning, with many arithmetic exercises. Some of the students were told to set themselves proximal goals of trying to do at least six pages’ worth of problems in each session. Others were told to set only one distal goal of completing forty-two pages by the end of seven sessions. The pace was thus the same for both goals. A third group did not set goals, and a fourth group did not even do the exercises.