Implementation intentions

Good intentions often fail at the moment of action, not because people change their minds, but because the moment passes unnoticed. A specific plan fixes that. A meta-analysis of 94 studies found that forming if-then plans had a medium-to-large effect on reaching goals (d = 0.65). In a field experiment at a large company, employees who were asked to write down the date and time they planned to get a flu shot got vaccinated 4.2 percentage points more often than the 33.1% in the control group. Writing down only the date had no significant effect. Before the 2008 US presidential election, phone calls that asked people when, where and how they would vote raised turnout by 4.1 percentage points, and by 9.1 points in households with only one eligible voter, while a standard encouragement call had no significant effect. The plan has to be concrete: a time, a place, a cue.