Suchergebnis

Titel des Experiments
Self-control and working from home

Autoren
Baumann, Julia; Danilov, Anastasia; Stavrova, Olga

Kurzbeschreibung des Experiments
Our experiment studies the relationship between self-control and performance while working from home. The subjects of the study will be professionals working at least partly from home, recruited via the platform Prolific.co.
We will contact the subjects three times: for an in-take survey and treatment manipulation, after 3 days with a reminder of the treatment manipulation, and after 7 days with a second survey. The data collection is fully anonymous using the Prolific.co identifiers and subjects will be paid for their participation in each survey based on its duration according to the platform’s standards.
In the first survey, we will measure traits such as self-control, patience, intrinsic work motivation, well-being, life satisfaction, and personality traits. We also elicit the level of education, information regarding professional success, self-management, and demographic characteristics.
At the end of the first survey, the participants will be randomly assigned to one of the three treatments (plus control condition). The treatment strands represent behavioral strategies that have previously been shown to be beneficial strategies that people naturally use to increase their self-control (Milyavskaya et al. 2020).
The behavioral strategies are:
- Remove any distractions from your workplace.
- Remind yourself of your (work) goals.
- When you face a distraction, promise yourself to give in later instead of now.
The control group will not be given a specific strategy. Subjects will be asked to follow these strategies whenever possible during the following week. As part of the treatment, they are asked to write down a short text regarding how they implement the respective strategy. We will use these answers to measure the cognitive attention but also to send a reminder and compare with the second survey. The longitudinal connection of data points within each subject will be done based on the anonymous ID from Prolific.co. We will not collect any personal information at any time.
The treatments are non-invasive, can be tailored to individual needs and are on average expected to increase participants’ productivity and well-being (see e.g., Duckworth et al. 2016). Subjects can opt out of the treatment by not completing their writing assignment and/or not following the strategy during their work week.
In the middle of the week, we will contact subjects with a personalized reminder email. At the end of the week, participants are asked about their experiences during the treatment period. We will evaluate the use of the assigned strategy and its success evaluated by the subjects’ (change in) productivity, goal achievement and well-being.
After the experiment is conducted, we aim to evaluate the average treatment effects. We will also analyze success of strategy conditional on subjects’ individual characteristics. This evaluation will reveal whether some self-control strategies are more effective than others for individuals with different attributes. We plan on using these insights in a future separate project with personalized self-control treatments.

Duckworth, Angela L., Rachel E. White, Alyssa J. Matteucci, Annie Shearer, and James J. Gross. “A Stitch in Time: Strategic Self-Control in High School and College Students.” Journal of Educational Psychology 108, no. 3 (2016): 329.

Milyavskaya, Marina, Blair Saunders, and Michael Inzlicht. “Self-Control in Daily Life: Prevalence and Effectiveness of Diverse Self-Control Strategies.” Journal of Personality 2020.

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