The Big Bang of Intention

A tool to help address the universal challenge of bridging word and deed

Well done is better than well said.

Benjamin Franklin

I am no expert on our cosmological origins. Thus, I warily wager that the Big Bang did not intend on peopling the Earth with the panoply of life that it sustains. Stories of creation, on the other hand, are typically suspect of an accidental emergence of life and instead present the universe as arising from an intentional act of creation.

Of all the creation stories, I am the most familiar with the Biblical account. In the Book of Genesis, God speaks the universe into being. This mode of creation truly fascinates me because of what it implies. For God, there is no distance between word and deed. What is spoken is what is. This certainly imbues God’s fashioning of human beings by hand with a special significance, but I digress. The focus of this essay relates to the distance between word and deed. Humans, unlike God, flounder when it comes to translating intentions into behaviours. This essay explores this intention–behaviour gap and attempts to equip its readers with a research-grounded practice that can help bridge it.

Our species is fascinated by the idea of new beginnings. In a 2014 paper, Dai et al. write comprehensively about the “fresh start effect”—the immense vigour with which individuals aspire to improve aspects of their lives during specific temporal milestones. This is famously observed in the week leading up to New Year’s Day, when countless individuals around the world resolve to eat healthily, go to the gym, mend their sleep hygiene, read more, etc. During this period, there is what I call a Big Bang of Intention, but one that generally fails to lead to the materialisation of habit.

I was attending Mass when I encountered another Biblical parallel for this observation: the parable of the two sons. Jesus paints the picture of a father who goes to two of his sons and asks them to work in his vineyard. One son initially refuses but changes his mind and works anyway, while the other one agrees with alacrity but fails to act on his agreement. This parable does a remarkable job of presenting us with two out of the four types of people when it comes to goal attainment.

The first son is an example of a disinclined actor—a person who says they won’t act towards attaining a goal but does the work anyway—while the second son is an inclined abstainer, a person who says they will act but fails to do so. The other two types of people are inclined actors (people who follow through on promises) and disinclined abstainers (people who say, “I will not work the vineyard,” and end up not going to the vineyard).

Most of us are guilty of being inclined abstainers, like the second son in the parable, far more often than we would like to admit. We long for a means by which we can act on our goal intentions. Two researchers, Peter Gollwitzer and Paschal Sheeran, spent over a decade wrestling with this question, and they devised a tool that can actually help us act on our intentions! (Check: Sources for Further Thinkering.)

The tool is called the implementation intention. Most goals are fraught with ambiguity. For instance, consider the goal: Read more! This goal intention is completely devoid of information. What do I read more of? When do I read the more that I intend to read? What counts as “more”? How do I read more? The implementation intention is the solution to the ambiguity that typically shrouds our goals, interrupting progress. Gollwitzer and Sheeran conceptualise them as a second act of willing (in addition to the primary goal intention) that uses if–then statements to clearly define the when, where, and how of goal striving.

Returning to our poorly specified goal intention—Read more!—Gollwitzer and Sheeran might recommend devising an implementation intention that explains when you will read, how long you will read for, and perhaps even the location where you will carry out your reading sessions. Eventually, you end up creating an implementation intention to supplement your goal intention that bears the following form:

Once I have had breakfast, I will seat myself at my study desk with my morning tea and read Cormac McCarthy’s The Road for 30 minutes.

Gollwitzer and Sheeran noticed that a lucid illustration of the cue for the behaviour (which is completing breakfast in the case above) promotes the performance of the action. They also demonstrated that it is vital to specify stopping conditions so that individuals know when the goal has been successfully met and they can disengage without any guilt.

Before I conclude this essay, let me make the if–then sentence structure of implementation intentions more explicit. In the example rendered above, the if, then, and stopping-condition components are as follows:

If: I have had breakfast.

Then: I will seat myself at my study desk with my morning tea and read Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.

Stopping condition: For 30 minutes.

With that, I lay this essay to rest. I would love to hear whether you have tried devising implementation intentions for yourself and whether they were effective. Here’s to taking steps towards becoming inclined actors by reducing the distance between the Big Bang of Intention and the materialisation of habit.

~ Granville D. Austin

Sources for Further Thinkering:

The Fresh Start Effect: Temporal Landmarks Motivate Aspirational Behavior

A large-scale experiment on New Year’s resolutions: Approach-oriented goals are more successful than avoidance-oriented goals | PLOS One

Implementation Intentions and Goal Achievement: A Meta-Analysis of Effects and Processes

Matthew 21:28-32 NIV – The Parable of the Two Sons