There is a particular kind of relief in making a Plan B. The future stops looking like a narrow bridge over a long drop. If the interview goes badly, there is another company. If the application fails, there is another course. If the project does not work, there is a safer version waiting.
That relief is real. It may also be part of the problem.
In four laboratory experiments published in 2016, Jihae Shin and Katherine Milkman found that merely forming a backup plan could reduce people’s desire for their primary goal and hurt their performance when the result depended on effort. Their explanation was less dramatic than a failure of willpower: once failure had acquired a softer landing, success no longer exerted quite the same pull.
There is an important precision here. The studies did not show that participants suddenly believed their first goal was less valuable. They showed a reduction in desire. That difference matters, because we can sincerely insist that an objective matters while feeling less compelled to pursue it.
A Plan B is not just another route to Plan A
The researchers used a narrow definition of a backup plan: an alternative goal that becomes active if the primary goal fails. That is different from having several ways to reach the same destination.
If I need to get across town, knowing I can take the train or the bus gives me two paths to one outcome. If I decide that I will stay home and watch a film if both fail, that is a fallback. Only the second option makes the original failure easier to absorb.
This is why the study is not an argument against planning. Detailed “if-then” plans can help translate intentions into action, as Peter Gollwitzer’s work on implementation intentions has long suggested. Shin and Milkman were asking a more specific question: what happens when we picture a different reward waiting if we do not get the one we want?
A snack was enough to reveal the trade-off
In the first experiment, 160 university participants attempted a sentence-unscrambling task. Strong performance could earn them a free snack. Before starting, one group was asked to think of other ways to obtain free food on campus if they failed to win it.
That tiny exercise was the Plan B. The participants who completed it solved an average of 4.21 sentences, compared with 4.48 in the control group. The difference was small, but statistically significant.
Crucially, the fallback did not significantly change how important or valuable participants said the snack was. It was not a conscious declaration that Plan A no longer counted. Something quieter had shifted between endorsing the goal and exerting effort for it.
Two follow-up experiments replaced the snack with a pass that allowed participants to skip a five-minute study. People who first generated another way to save five minutes again completed fewer sentences than controls. The researchers also included comparison groups designed to test whether thinking about the fallback merely made the original reward seem less special, or whether brainstorming itself was mentally tiring. Neither explanation accounted for the result.
The dollar experiment reached the desire beneath performance
The final experiment offered an extra dollar for strong task performance. Participants in the backup condition considered other ways they might save a dollar during the next 24 hours.
Once again, forming the fallback hurt performance. This time, the researchers also measured how much participants wanted the original reward. Desire was lower among those who had made a backup plan, and the analysis indicated that this reduction partly explained their poorer results. Measures of distraction did not explain the effect.
That gives the finding its uncomfortable edge. The alternative did not need to be chosen, used or even especially elaborate. Simply making it psychologically available appeared to change the energy directed towards the first goal.
I have written before about how thinking about self-improvement can be mistaken for changing. Plan B introduces a related trap. Preparing for the possibility of failure feels like responsible progress, but the feeling of being prepared can arrive before any progress on Plan A has been made.
The fallback changes the emotional price of failure
Shin and Milkman’s account is straightforward. A backup plan provides an emotional safety net. It reduces the uncertainty and anticipated disappointment attached to failing at the primary goal. That protection can be valuable later. Before the attempt, however, it may also remove some of the urgency that drives effort.
This is not quite the same as saying fear is the best motivator. Chronic threat can narrow thinking, damage health and make good work harder. The point is more modest: desire is partly shaped by contrast. When the alternative to success looks comfortable, success may feel less necessary.
A 2016 review by Shin and colleagues describes backup plans as both a safety net and a possible motivational expense. Whether that expense is worth paying depends on what protection the fallback provides, how likely failure is and how much effort can still influence the result.
This is not evidence that every Plan B is bad
The experiments were short, low-stakes and conducted with university students or online participants. The rewards were a snack, five minutes and one dollar. They establish a causal effect under controlled conditions; they do not tell us how large or durable that effect is in a career change, a marriage, a medical decision or a five-year business project.
The authors also drew a sharp boundary around their conclusion. A fallback is most likely to hurt when effort strongly determines performance. If an outcome rests mainly on luck, timing, innate ability or decisions made by someone else, reduced desire may not change whether we succeed. In that situation, a backup can preserve options at little performance cost.
Some plans are also duties, not motivational devices. Emergency procedures, financial buffers, data backups and safety redundancies exist because the cost of having no alternative is unacceptable. No sensible reading of a sentence puzzle should persuade us to remove them.
It is also worth remembering that the effect concerned a different fallback goal. Finding multiple routes to the same objective can make pursuit more resilient. The danger is not flexibility. It is allowing an attractive consolation prize to begin competing for attention before Plan A has had a fair attempt.
The practical lesson may be about timing, not bravado
The paper’s authors suggested that people might delay forming a backup until effort towards the primary goal has been exhausted. That is a reasonable hypothesis, not a rule their experiments proved. In real life, waiting can itself be costly, and some alternatives disappear unless we prepare early.
A more useful approach is to keep the protection while limiting how vividly it competes. Decide in advance what evidence would justify changing course. Set a date for review. Build alternative routes that still serve the same main goal. If a true fallback must exist, record it clearly and then return your attention to the work in front of you.
There is humility in this. Commitment does not require pretending failure is impossible. Nor does prudence require emotionally moving into the spare room before the main house has burned down.
Plan B deserves a place in the drawer. The experiments suggest it does not always deserve a place on the desk.