7 ms·

The illusion of progress lights a fire

124 points by jayliew 14y ago

zach 14y ago
Another way to make the task seem less daunting is to make the card vertical, presenting four rows (of three stamps each) to complete instead of two rows of six. Grouping focuses people on immediate completion (visually completing a line or block) and keeping the relevant numbers small (3 and 4 instead of 12), even if the groups have no nominal significance.
- gojomo 14y ago
  I wonder if actually making the rows early-redeemable, for less than the proportionate total reward, could also help. For example, in a 4x3 card, maybe each row of 3 gets you 15% off if redeemed early. In this way, you're always close to something with provable value; you're more likely to value/carry/protect the partially-completed card; but you're also still likely to go for the 12-for-100%-off rather than stopping at 3-for-15% / 6-for-30% / 9-for-45% off. (The various App punchcards bring the possibility of running many more incremental tests in this area, and novelties like 'awakening' dormant customers with a gifted stamp or two.)
ktizo 14y ago
If a coffee shop is doing this deliberately to manipulate you, is it therefore ethical to give the illusion of progress to the coffee shop in turn, by stamping a couple yourself?
- artsrc 14y ago
  Is that like shop lifting at stores which charge $2.99 instead of $3.00 to give you the illusion of cheapness?
  - ktizo 14y ago
    Maybe if you were shoplifting occasional penny sweets. Was just meaning there has to be a limit to how far this kind of thing can be pushed without getting downright dodgy in and of itself, and outright psychological manipulation for profit can reach a level where it is really not much better than theft. I don't think that adding a couple of stamps to a loyalty card is particularly bad, and was just joking to make a point, but the pathological obsessiveness of modern marketing and the way that it can feed back into a mindset of treating your customers as punters or even prey, is something that I think is pretty destructive in our current culture. [edit] I just realised the above is readable either way. I was meaning that I don't think that the shop adding a couple of extra stamps is really that bad. Obviously adding them yourself is nicking coffee and is only remotely acceptable when either dying of thirst, or possibly when visiting starbucks. :)
    - deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]
- gojomo 14y ago
  This is an interesting question, but I think a bright-line distinction is fairly easy to make. It's not unethical to try to influence someone, even subconsciously, even by the choice of arbitrary design elements ("you start with 2 of 12 checked") -- as long as there's no deception. Introducing deception crosses the ethical line. So faking a purchase that was never made to gain a benefit is unethical. Perhaps there's a bit of grayness in that the 2/12 stamps makes people prone to underestimate the magnitude of the remaining effort ("5/6ths remaining") compared to an absolute measure ("10 of 10 purchases remaining"). But without there being a misrepresentation -- for example, a claim that the first 2 stamps are a special favor not usually granted -- all info for a proper evaluation is available and truthful. And it's even possible that such an influence is to the consumer's net benefit: maybe there's another cognitive bias against completely-unstarted efforts, causing people to overestimate effort required and never get started on things they'd actually enjoy. In any case, once the alternatives start requiring discussion or even controlled study to evaluate, it's harder to apply a stark label like 'unethical'. That label is more useful on easier-to-evaluate actions like prima facia deception. (Still, the point is well taken that these are some sort of continuum, and it might be the case that a certain superficially-truthful offering is so likely to be misinterpreted by an average reader/listener that it is still de facto deception. I don't think the reward-stamps case is anywhere near that line... but carefully-wordsmithed political ads, designed to create false impressions without being blatantly falsifiable, often go right up to and over the line.)
  - ktizo 14y ago
    It's not unethical to try to influence someone, even subconsciously, even by the choice of arbitrary design elements ("you start with 2 of 12 checked") -- as long as there's no deception. In the simple case this is usually true, but I do wonder when you start throwing millions of dollars at researching exactly this sort of influence and start looking at pavlovian trigger mechanisms and stuff like that. Most people aren't trained confidence tricksters, stage magicians or professional psychologists, but modern marketing at its most sophisticated is the combination of all three, backed with vast wealth and global reach, and it has already long gone beyond any pretence of acting as a way of informing people of things they might like to buy and has instead attempted, with a lot of success, to become the product itself. And, in case anyone was in doubt, I do not entirely regard this as a good thing.
FreshCode 14y ago
I wonder how this be could be applied to customer service, queues and waiting lines outside of loyalty card programs.
- jason_shah 14y ago
  "Your expected wait time is 45 minutes..." And then after a brief moment, the same voice comes on and says "We've cut your time in half. It's just 20 minutes now!"
  - FreshCode 14y ago
    Like loading screens that go faster near the end? I don't know that making the wait time look worse than it already is (40m vs 30m) will please customers.
    - ckorhonen 14y ago
      I agree - for a once in a blue moon interaction, sure, not having to wait as long as you originally thought might be good. For any kind of interaction which may be repeated then it just makes you look like a stupid business owner or software developer who can't properly estimate how long something will take!
      - plorkyeran 14y ago
        I'm not sure that's true. One case that comes to mind is World of Warcraft server queues. In general, waiting in a queue to log into a server is something a player does either daily or never, and people really like to comment on their very exciting experience in the queue once they finally get in. In several years, I don't remember ever seeing a negative comment about how the queue didn't take as long as the initial estimate and in fact there were often positive comments when that happened. On the other hand, when the initial estimate was too low, people frequently complained about how bad Blizzard was at providing estimates.
  - shrikant 14y ago
tobtoh 14y ago
A variation of this hack which is used by my local car wash: Buy a booklet of 10 pre-paid vouchers for the car wash and get a free car wash ... right now. According to the owners, moving the 'free' car wash to be immediately available rather than at the end of the voucher book say a significant increase in people who bought them - even though ultimately it made no difference financially to the customers.
- Evbn 14y ago
  Huh? Don't you get all the carwash vouchers when you pay? Which one is the "free" one?
  - sigkill 14y ago
    He means that when you buy the vouchers, you don't have to tear one off right away. This is bloody genius I'd say.
  - pizza 14y ago
    He's saying you can buy eleven carwashes for the cost of ten, and the immediate reward increases sales.
  - InclinedPlane 14y ago
    It's exactly the same thing as selling someone 11 pre-paid car washes. But by making the 11th car wash "free" and available immediately people perceive that as a bigger boon than a 9% discount.
enpyre 14y ago
ah, the good ol' loyalty card. I took a grad level marketing class as an undergrad in my time at my university and remember my professor mentioning this very same paper. Always found it fascinating, and at the time I was working at a bakery part time as well. Pitched the idea to them, they implemented, but the gains were marginal. Although, I suspect because business went down simultaneously during that period that no gain or no noticeable change could be seen as something of a positive, because everything else was in decline. So, yeah, I guess you would say it has real world application. its also a really easy to demonstrate idea. I bring it up every time i encounter a loyalty card, just because I find it so damn interesting and remember the exact moment that my professor told us about this, eye opening example.
- sliverstorm 14y ago
  One thing that comes to mind- you would probably want a period of time where the 12-mark card has no prefilled marks, so that customers adjust. If you switch directly from 10-mark to 12-mark with two prefilled, the trick is a little more apparent.
DannoHung 14y ago
Is there a limit to how steep on the gradient you can go with this? If you give someone 900 out of 1,000 will they be rushing to fill in that last 100 because they've only got ten percent left on the card? Or is it limited to easily foreseeable goals in the single digit or near to that range?
- efsavage 14y ago
  My guess would be that the 12 is already near the limit. The two "free" stars feel like a little personal gift, especially if they actually punch them out when they give them to you, with a sly wink or something. If it was 900/1000, it would feel confusing and dishonest. You might also gain some actual loyalty if you give them the last one for free, since that would be an unexpected treat reserved for people who bought 9 cups of coffee.
reedlaw 14y ago
Personally I'm not sure how effective loyalty cards can be. I prefer to shop places where the perceived prices are reasonable over shops that offer big discounts through loyalty programs (e.g. Trader Joe's vs. just about any supermarket chain). The reasoning is that I prefer the freedom to do without mental calculations over rewards programs over actual dollar savings. That is, I'd rather pay more not to have to think about cards, stamps, rewards, etc.
- randallsquared 14y ago
  This is why the price on the shelf at most supermarkets is the loyalty card price.
dhughes 14y ago
I was just thinking today my Starbucks card has buy however many cups of coffee to get to the gold level where you get a few free perks. Then I realized how foolish I was to buy anything other than the smallest size since I would have made the same progress for far less money.
- evoxed 14y ago
  Starbucks cards are great. My JP card only gives me ANA miles (1/dollar spent, so pretty much nothing) but in NYC... there's one everywhere, so I'll get my tea to walk, get to the next store and get a croissant to eat in the park, then continue on to the next to buy the paper. Maybe another tea when I'm about to leave. That's 4 stars for $8. Then when you get your coupon, Trenta all the way. And don't forget the free refills on your smaller drinks (you get one refill per drink).
alwaysinshade 14y ago
This is also known as the Endowed Progress Effect. A paper from 2006 discusses it in a fairly easy to read format. Extract: "This research documents a phenomenon we call the endowed progress effect whereby people provided with artificial advancement towards a goal exhibit greater persistence towards reaching the goal. By converting a task requiring eight steps into a task requiring 10 steps, but with two steps already complete, the task is reframed as one that has been undertaken and incomplete rather than not yet begun. This increases the likelihood of task completion and decreases completion time. The effect appears to depend on perceptions of task completion rather than a desire to avoid wasting the endowed progress. Moderators include the reason, if any, offered for the endowment, and the currency in which progress is recorded." PDF is available here: https://marketing.wharton.upenn.edu/files/?whdmsaction=public:main.file&fileID=283 https://marketing.wharton.upenn.edu/files/?whdmsaction=publi...
Apocryphon 14y ago
I've experienced this while running- on the last lap, I suddenly feel relief and a rush of energy (or lack of tiredness). I always attribute it to a desire to tough out the last bit so I can get to a greater relief.
6ren 14y ago
What's the evolutionary advantage to run slower when the goal is distant, in humans and rats? Hacking yourself to run at maximum might be maladaptive (like coffee), unless you are aware of and manage the downsides.
- jsmcgd 14y ago
  Perhaps because the risk of wasted investment is greater the further you are from your goal.
- danmaz74 14y ago
  It could be related to risk and energy expenditure. Moving faster requires more energy, and the farther away your piece of cheese is, the more likely it is that something unexpected might happen to take it away/stop you before you get to it. Add to this that there can always be more pieces of cheese to find, and always running from one to the next one could not be your best course of action.
  - repsilat 14y ago
    It's also that short distances are more accurately judged than long ones (ditto endurance over short distances). There are often sprints to the finish in running races when there's a final surge of adrenaline, when you realise you can sustain an increased pace all the way to the end.
jrgnsd 14y ago
Apply this to programming, and it's easy to see why people using frameworks and libraries progress further faster: A number of of goals are reached by just spinning up the framework and installing a few gems.
rotten 14y ago
Maybe it is like sex - the closer to the end you get, the faster you tend to go.

124 points by jayliew 14y ago

zach 14y ago

Another way to make the task seem less daunting is to make the card vertical, presenting four rows (of three stamps each) to complete instead of two rows of six. Grouping focuses people on immediate completion (visually completing a line or block) and keeping the relevant numbers small (3 and 4 instead of 12), even if the groups have no nominal significance.

gojomo 14y ago
I wonder if actually making the rows early-redeemable, for less than the proportionate total reward, could also help. For example, in a 4x3 card, maybe each row of 3 gets you 15% off if redeemed early. In this way, you're always close to something with provable value; you're more likely to value/carry/protect the partially-completed card; but you're also still likely to go for the 12-for-100%-off rather than stopping at 3-for-15% / 6-for-30% / 9-for-45% off. (The various App punchcards bring the possibility of running many more incremental tests in this area, and novelties like 'awakening' dormant customers with a gifted stamp or two.)

ktizo 14y ago

If a coffee shop is doing this deliberately to manipulate you, is it therefore ethical to give the illusion of progress to the coffee shop in turn, by stamping a couple yourself?

artsrc 14y ago
Is that like shop lifting at stores which charge $2.99 instead of $3.00 to give you the illusion of cheapness?
- ktizo 14y ago
  Maybe if you were shoplifting occasional penny sweets. Was just meaning there has to be a limit to how far this kind of thing can be pushed without getting downright dodgy in and of itself, and outright psychological manipulation for profit can reach a level where it is really not much better than theft. I don't think that adding a couple of stamps to a loyalty card is particularly bad, and was just joking to make a point, but the pathological obsessiveness of modern marketing and the way that it can feed back into a mindset of treating your customers as punters or even prey, is something that I think is pretty destructive in our current culture. [edit] I just realised the above is readable either way. I was meaning that I don't think that the shop adding a couple of extra stamps is really that bad. Obviously adding them yourself is nicking coffee and is only remotely acceptable when either dying of thirst, or possibly when visiting starbucks. :)
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
gojomo 14y ago
This is an interesting question, but I think a bright-line distinction is fairly easy to make. It's not unethical to try to influence someone, even subconsciously, even by the choice of arbitrary design elements ("you start with 2 of 12 checked") -- as long as there's no deception. Introducing deception crosses the ethical line. So faking a purchase that was never made to gain a benefit is unethical. Perhaps there's a bit of grayness in that the 2/12 stamps makes people prone to underestimate the magnitude of the remaining effort ("5/6ths remaining") compared to an absolute measure ("10 of 10 purchases remaining"). But without there being a misrepresentation -- for example, a claim that the first 2 stamps are a special favor not usually granted -- all info for a proper evaluation is available and truthful. And it's even possible that such an influence is to the consumer's net benefit: maybe there's another cognitive bias against completely-unstarted efforts, causing people to overestimate effort required and never get started on things they'd actually enjoy. In any case, once the alternatives start requiring discussion or even controlled study to evaluate, it's harder to apply a stark label like 'unethical'. That label is more useful on easier-to-evaluate actions like prima facia deception. (Still, the point is well taken that these are some sort of continuum, and it might be the case that a certain superficially-truthful offering is so likely to be misinterpreted by an average reader/listener that it is still de facto deception. I don't think the reward-stamps case is anywhere near that line... but carefully-wordsmithed political ads, designed to create false impressions without being blatantly falsifiable, often go right up to and over the line.)
- ktizo 14y ago
  It's not unethical to try to influence someone, even subconsciously, even by the choice of arbitrary design elements ("you start with 2 of 12 checked") -- as long as there's no deception. In the simple case this is usually true, but I do wonder when you start throwing millions of dollars at researching exactly this sort of influence and start looking at pavlovian trigger mechanisms and stuff like that. Most people aren't trained confidence tricksters, stage magicians or professional psychologists, but modern marketing at its most sophisticated is the combination of all three, backed with vast wealth and global reach, and it has already long gone beyond any pretence of acting as a way of informing people of things they might like to buy and has instead attempted, with a lot of success, to become the product itself. And, in case anyone was in doubt, I do not entirely regard this as a good thing.

FreshCode 14y ago

I wonder how this be could be applied to customer service, queues and waiting lines outside of loyalty card programs.

jason_shah 14y ago
"Your expected wait time is 45 minutes..." And then after a brief moment, the same voice comes on and says "We've cut your time in half. It's just 20 minutes now!"
- FreshCode 14y ago
  Like loading screens that go faster near the end? I don't know that making the wait time look worse than it already is (40m vs 30m) will please customers.
  - ckorhonen 14y ago
    I agree - for a once in a blue moon interaction, sure, not having to wait as long as you originally thought might be good. For any kind of interaction which may be repeated then it just makes you look like a stupid business owner or software developer who can't properly estimate how long something will take!
    - plorkyeran 14y ago
      I'm not sure that's true. One case that comes to mind is World of Warcraft server queues. In general, waiting in a queue to log into a server is something a player does either daily or never, and people really like to comment on their very exciting experience in the queue once they finally get in. In several years, I don't remember ever seeing a negative comment about how the queue didn't take as long as the initial estimate and in fact there were often positive comments when that happened. On the other hand, when the initial estimate was too low, people frequently complained about how bad Blizzard was at providing estimates.
- shrikant 14y ago

tobtoh 14y ago

A variation of this hack which is used by my local car wash: Buy a booklet of 10 pre-paid vouchers for the car wash and get a free car wash ... right now. According to the owners, moving the 'free' car wash to be immediately available rather than at the end of the voucher book say a significant increase in people who bought them - even though ultimately it made no difference financially to the customers.

Evbn 14y ago
Huh? Don't you get all the carwash vouchers when you pay? Which one is the "free" one?
- sigkill 14y ago
  He means that when you buy the vouchers, you don't have to tear one off right away. This is bloody genius I'd say.
- pizza 14y ago
  He's saying you can buy eleven carwashes for the cost of ten, and the immediate reward increases sales.
- InclinedPlane 14y ago
  It's exactly the same thing as selling someone 11 pre-paid car washes. But by making the 11th car wash "free" and available immediately people perceive that as a bigger boon than a 9% discount.

enpyre 14y ago

ah, the good ol' loyalty card. I took a grad level marketing class as an undergrad in my time at my university and remember my professor mentioning this very same paper. Always found it fascinating, and at the time I was working at a bakery part time as well. Pitched the idea to them, they implemented, but the gains were marginal. Although, I suspect because business went down simultaneously during that period that no gain or no noticeable change could be seen as something of a positive, because everything else was in decline. So, yeah, I guess you would say it has real world application. its also a really easy to demonstrate idea. I bring it up every time i encounter a loyalty card, just because I find it so damn interesting and remember the exact moment that my professor told us about this, eye opening example.

sliverstorm 14y ago
One thing that comes to mind- you would probably want a period of time where the 12-mark card has no prefilled marks, so that customers adjust. If you switch directly from 10-mark to 12-mark with two prefilled, the trick is a little more apparent.

DannoHung 14y ago

Is there a limit to how steep on the gradient you can go with this? If you give someone 900 out of 1,000 will they be rushing to fill in that last 100 because they've only got ten percent left on the card? Or is it limited to easily foreseeable goals in the single digit or near to that range?

efsavage 14y ago
My guess would be that the 12 is already near the limit. The two "free" stars feel like a little personal gift, especially if they actually punch them out when they give them to you, with a sly wink or something. If it was 900/1000, it would feel confusing and dishonest. You might also gain some actual loyalty if you give them the last one for free, since that would be an unexpected treat reserved for people who bought 9 cups of coffee.

reedlaw 14y ago

Personally I'm not sure how effective loyalty cards can be. I prefer to shop places where the perceived prices are reasonable over shops that offer big discounts through loyalty programs (e.g. Trader Joe's vs. just about any supermarket chain). The reasoning is that I prefer the freedom to do without mental calculations over rewards programs over actual dollar savings. That is, I'd rather pay more not to have to think about cards, stamps, rewards, etc.

randallsquared 14y ago
This is why the price on the shelf at most supermarkets is the loyalty card price.

dhughes 14y ago

I was just thinking today my Starbucks card has buy however many cups of coffee to get to the gold level where you get a few free perks. Then I realized how foolish I was to buy anything other than the smallest size since I would have made the same progress for far less money.

evoxed 14y ago
Starbucks cards are great. My JP card only gives me ANA miles (1/dollar spent, so pretty much nothing) but in NYC... there's one everywhere, so I'll get my tea to walk, get to the next store and get a croissant to eat in the park, then continue on to the next to buy the paper. Maybe another tea when I'm about to leave. That's 4 stars for $8. Then when you get your coupon, Trenta all the way. And don't forget the free refills on your smaller drinks (you get one refill per drink).

alwaysinshade 14y ago

This is also known as the Endowed Progress Effect. A paper from 2006 discusses it in a fairly easy to read format. Extract: "This research documents a phenomenon we call the endowed progress effect whereby people provided with artificial advancement towards a goal exhibit greater persistence towards reaching the goal. By converting a task requiring eight steps into a task requiring 10 steps, but with two steps already complete, the task is reframed as one that has been undertaken and incomplete rather than not yet begun. This increases the likelihood of task completion and decreases completion time. The effect appears to depend on perceptions of task completion rather than a desire to avoid wasting the endowed progress. Moderators include the reason, if any, offered for the endowment, and the currency in which progress is recorded." PDF is available here: https://marketing.wharton.upenn.edu/files/?whdmsaction=public:main.file&fileID=283 https://marketing.wharton.upenn.edu/files/?whdmsaction=publi...

Apocryphon 14y ago

I've experienced this while running- on the last lap, I suddenly feel relief and a rush of energy (or lack of tiredness). I always attribute it to a desire to tough out the last bit so I can get to a greater relief.

6ren 14y ago

What's the evolutionary advantage to run slower when the goal is distant, in humans and rats? Hacking yourself to run at maximum might be maladaptive (like coffee), unless you are aware of and manage the downsides.

jsmcgd 14y ago
Perhaps because the risk of wasted investment is greater the further you are from your goal.
danmaz74 14y ago
It could be related to risk and energy expenditure. Moving faster requires more energy, and the farther away your piece of cheese is, the more likely it is that something unexpected might happen to take it away/stop you before you get to it. Add to this that there can always be more pieces of cheese to find, and always running from one to the next one could not be your best course of action.
- repsilat 14y ago
  It's also that short distances are more accurately judged than long ones (ditto endurance over short distances). There are often sprints to the finish in running races when there's a final surge of adrenaline, when you realise you can sustain an increased pace all the way to the end.

jrgnsd 14y ago

Apply this to programming, and it's easy to see why people using frameworks and libraries progress further faster: A number of of goals are reached by just spinning up the framework and installing a few gems.

rotten 14y ago

Maybe it is like sex - the closer to the end you get, the faster you tend to go.