When it comes to setting organisational and personal goals, making a backup plan has been seen as a sensible way to deal with uncertainty - to be prepared if things do not go as expected, researchers said.
Jihae Shin and Katherine L Milkman from University of Pennsylvania in the US conducted a series of experiments that showed making a backup plan can cause people not to work as hard and to be less successful at attaining their primary goal.
Some groups were then instructed to come up with other ways they could get free food on campus or save time later in the day in case they did not do well enough to earn the snack or the early dismissal in their current study.
Those in the groups making backup plans showed lower performance on the task, and a follow-up experiment showed a key factor driving this effect was a diminished desire for goal success, researchers said.
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Researchers suggest that understanding those costs can be important, especially in those cases where goals can be achieved through effort.
In instances where they can be achieved by luck or innate skill, on the other hand, making a backup plan is not expected to reduce goal performance.
Researchers suggest that while they find potential costs to making a backup plan, it does not mean that people should go through life without ever having them.
"You might want to wait until you have done everything you can to achieve your primary goal first," said Shin.
The findings were published in the journal Organisational Behaviour and Human Decision Processes.
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