Operations, Information and Decisions Papers

Document Type

Technical Report

Date of this Version

7-2016

Publication Source

Psychological Science

Volume

27

Issue

7

Start Page

973

Last Page

986

DOI

10.1177/0956797616643071

Abstract

People often fail to follow through on good intentions. While limited self-control is frequently the culprit, another cause is simply forgetting to enact intentions when opportunities arise. We introduce a novel, potent approach to facilitating follow-through: the reminders-through-association approach. This approach involves associating intentions (e.g., to mail a letter on your desk tomorrow) with distinctive cues that will capture attention when you have opportunities to act on those intentions (e.g., Valentine’s Day flowers that arrived late yesterday, which are sitting on your desk). We showed that cue-based reminders are more potent when the cues they employ are distinctive relative to (a) other regularly encountered stimuli and (b) other stimuli encountered concurrently. Further, they can be more effective than written or electronic reminder messages, and they are undervalued and underused. The reminders-through-association approach, developed by integrating and expanding on past research on self-control, reminders, and prospective memory, can be a powerful tool for policymakers and individuals.

Copyright/Permission Statement

Rogers, T. & Milkman, K.L., Reminders through Association, Psychological Science 27, no. 7: pp. 973-986. Copyright © 2016 Association for Psychological Science. Reprinted by permission of SAGE Publications

This is a pre-publication version. The final version is available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0956797616643071

Keywords

decision making, memory, policymaking, self-control, open data, open materials

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Date Posted: 11 July 2018

This document has been peer reviewed.