Studies on self-control suggest that recollecting past mistakes is a good way to avoid making them again. But researchers thought there might be more to the story.
To find out, they decided to test the nuances of recall—and discovered that focusing on past behaviors isn’t always a good idea.
“Be very careful when you ask anybody to dig up the past,” says Kelly Haws, associate professor of marketing at Vanderbilt University. “That can be a very ineffective way to change future behavior for the better.”
In the first of a series of experiments published in the Journal of Consumer Psychology, researchers divided subjects into two groups. They asked one group to remember self-control “successes” —say, buying shoes from the sales rack rather than shelling out for new Jimmy Choos. The other group was asked to remember examples of poor choices, or “failures.”
