The Expectation Effect summary

When Barack Obama was president of the United States, he wore almost exactly the same suit every single day. The only thing that varied was the color; the suits were either dark brown or navy blue. (Let’s forget about the tan suit fiasco.) Obama isn’t alone in his limited wardrobe choices, either. In fact, lots of highly successful people, like Steve Jobs, Ariana Huffington, and Mark Zuckerberg all prefer to wear the exact same outfit every day. Why? It all has to do with their expectations. But as you’ll discover in this Blink, these expectations are totally wrong.

The reason why Obama and Zuckerberg dress the way they do is because they’re trying to get rid of unnecessary decision-making. For most of us, deciding what to wear each morning requires conscious thought. Do these pants match this shirt? Are these the best shoes to wear with this jacket? According to the theory known as ego depletion, we only have a limited amount of mental resources to use on decisions each day. After we’ve done a certain amount of hard work, or decision-making, or difficult thinking, those resources are exhausted. With this in mind, these leaders don’t want to waste their mental capacity on thinking about exactly what to wear. 

On the surface, the ego-depletion theory seems to make sense. After all, how many times have you come home from a hard day’s work and felt too exhausted to do anything except lie on the couch? Some experts have even suggested that the reason why successful people cheat on their partners is because they’ve used up all their mental willpower on their career. They simply don’t have the capacity to work on their relationships.

But just how true is any of this? Because, in fact, other evidence suggests that the ego-depletion theory is instead just one big expectation effect. The mental exhaustion we feel after working hard is real, but it’s only real because we expect it to be. At least, that’s according to a study by Austrian psychologist Veronika Job. Job asked participants to complete two tasks in a row. Before they began the first task, Job asked each participant whether performing hard work usually a) depletes their mental resources or b) energizes them.

Interestingly, Job found that the people who had listed hard work as exhausting did much worse on the second task than they did on the first. In contrast, those who listed hard work as energizing performed evenly across both tasks.

Now, this might seem like the predictable outcome, but, in a follow-up study, Job then tested whether it was possible to change people’s beliefs and expectations about their own mental depletion. So, for this next study, before participants undertook the two tasks, they each read one of two statements.

One statement stated that hard work depletes our mental resources, and the other stated the opposite: that hard work has been proven to energize our minds so much that it actually enables us to thrive on other hard tasks once we’ve started. Job found that the people who had read the “energizing” statement performed twice as well on their second task as those who had read the “depleting” statement. All because their expectations had been shifted.

This just goes to show that our mental capacity is much greater than many of us believe. With the right expectations, we really can get more done. So, the next time you find your concentration waning in the middle of a hard task, try and remind yourself of a time when you found a challenging task energizing rather than draining. Then ask yourself whether that energizing task was objectively harder than the task you’re undertaking right now. Reframing how you view the challenging task at hand will help give your mental stamina enough of a boost to power through.