Which One Are You? Promotion and Prevention Focus

If you ask most people, they'll tell you there are two types of people on this earth: one with x quality and one with y quality. There are people who love cats and people who love dogs, people who are masculine and people who are feminine, and people who drink coffee every morning and people who have poor taste - you get the idea. But is this truly how easy it is to fit everyone into a nice neat mold? Are we so simple of a species that you can place us into two distinct categories?

What has me talking about all these "this or that" scenarios? Well this book I've been reading does just that and categorizes people into two different groups: people who are prevention focused and people who are promotion focused. People who are prevention focused are generally more concerned with preventing the loss of what they already have. People who are promotion focused however are less concerned about losing what they have and more focused on when they gain. I've found this concept pretty interesting and relatively accurate.

Let me give you some examples. A prevention focused person will get to work early and leave work late, diligently organizing their files and papers in order to make sure none go missing. They'll go to any lengths they can to ensure they don't lose their job/clients, as any such loss would be a devastating detriment to them. These are typically people you hear called "Type A", the go-getters. Prevention oriented people are primarily concerned with security.

To a prevention focused person, most tasks and goals are oriented around gaining some form of safety. This could be through finances, status, or relationships with others, but at the heart of almost all of their motivations is gaining security. This could be because they didn't feel secure earlier on in life, or some other kind of formative experience that caused them to feel a lack of security. They feel they have to make up for this lack of security by gaining it now and latch onto it when they find it.

However, a promotion focused person will arrive at work whenever the inspiration to work strikes them (if they’re lucky enough to be able to do that), keeping a pretty unorganized work space where papers go missing quite frequently. They will go to great lengths to obtain their job/clients, as this kind of gain would be an enormous benefit to them, but after they gain them they won’t do as much to keep them. These are typically the people you would hear called "Type B", the more laid-back people. Promotion oriented people are primarily concerned with receiving nurture.

To a promotion-oriented person, most tasks and goals are focused around gaining some kind of nurturing. Whether that be through praise or merits for doing something exceedingly well, or just the positive reinforcement of feeling like a job was well done, once they complete something, they'll feel substantially more motivated to continue completing other things just as well. This desire to either nurture themselves or be nurtured by others' reinforcement could have also come from a lack, perceived or actual, of nurturing when they were younger. This would cause them to try and seek it out now when they have the actual ability to.

Now before you say "but I'm not just one or the other! I'm more complex than that!" let me go ahead and agree with you. Yes, you and people in general are often more complex than to be boiled down to just one or the other. Often times people will be promotion and prevention focused in general and favor one in certain situations. I could be promotion focused when my boss offers a promotion to the person who makes the most sales, but prevention focused when she says she'll fire the person who makes the least amount of sales. When situations are very clearly one way or the other, we'll become motivated in that way despite our dominant orientation.

Ellen Crowe and Tory Higgins (who is actually one of the authors of this promotion/prevention book I'm reading, it's called Focus if you want to check it out) found in their study Regulatory Focus and Strategic Inclinations: Promotion and Prevention in Decision Making, published in 1997 in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes find that “when individuals work on a difficult task or have just experienced failure, those in a promotion focus should be eager to find hits and insure against omitting any possible hits, whereas those in a prevention focus should be vigilant against mistakes and insure against committing the error of producing them”. What this means is not only are there proclivities to our decision-making behavior, but these proclivities can be manipulated.

In this study the independent variable was their focus, whether they were promotion or prevention focused. In order to test this, at the beginning of the experiment they had each participant fill out a questionnaire and state their most liked and most disliked activities (they give the example of playing video games and proofreading respectively). Then they were told to complete a set of tasks, and their performance on the task would determine what their final task would be. The final task would either be doing their disliked activity or their liked activity. They also manipulated the framing of the tasks.

For a promotion focus group they were told if they did well on the other tasks, their final task would be their liked activity instead of their disliked one. For the prevention focused group, they were told if they didn't do well on the other tasks, their final task would be their disliked activity instead of their liked one. They found that their predictions were supported and that while people may have proclivities in terms of their focus in general, the type of framing and task can determine which approach a person takes.

So, what are we supposed to do with this information? Well if we know what motivates people, we can appeal to those aspects of them much more easily. Also, just gaining a deeper understanding of how another person thinks can help us connect with them better. Plus, the fact that prevention and promotion orientation can be manipulated means if you know what someone’s proclivities are in general, you can frame a situation that resonates much more with them. The other insight this provides is that you can examine yourself and figure out which category you best belong to. Understanding this about yourself can help you focus better on certain tasks and provide incentives and disincentives to help yourself engage in certain behaviors. This kind of thinking can legitimately change your life if you let it.