The motivating power of streaks: Increasing persistence is as easy as 1, 2, 3
Katie S. Mehr, Jackie Silverman, Marissa A. Sharif, Alixandra Barasch, Katherine L. Milkman
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0749597825000032
People and organizations often set a variety of goals, such as to improve health, increase persistence, maximize income, and so on. Unfortunately, people often fail to follow through in achieving these goals. An important question for organizations, is how can people be encouraged to persist more successfully towards valued goals? In this paper, the authors introduce and test a novel incentive scheme designed to enhance persistence by increasing commitment to the goal of maximizing earnings. Specifically, they test “streak incentives”—rewards that offer people increasing payouts for completing multiple consecutive work tasks. Across six pre-registered studies, they show that people complete more work when compensated with streak incentives than with larger, stable incentives. Their findings contrast with standard economic models, which suggest people will complete more piece-rate work for larger rewards. The authors propose that by encouraging consecutive task completion, streak incentives increase commitment to a goal of maximizing earnings, which in turn increases persistence. Taken together, their results suggest that designing incentives to encourage streaks of work is a low-cost way to increase goal commitment and, therefore, persistence in organizations and other contexts.
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