Dr. Jordan Etkin is a researcher and Associate Professor of Marketing at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business. Dr. Etkin’s research focus has been on how we set and pursue goals. Some of her more recent research has evaluated how tracking aspects of behavior affects the enjoyment we derive from the activity being tracked.
Dr. Etkin is also a peer-reviewed author. Her work can be found in top-tier journals, as well as being frequently cited in the national press in publications like Fast Company, The Atlantic, the New York Times, Huffington Post, BBC, and Business Insider.
1) In your research paper, The Hidden Cost of Personal Quantification, you discuss some of the potential risks of tracking behavior. The two that really stood out for me are: 1) how tracking activity changes our motivation, and 2) our bias towards believing tracking will improve our experience engaging in the tracked activity. Could you briefly explain both these risks?
This idea that people seem to believe that seeing some quantified feedback will make experiences better, make them do better, potentially help improve performance can be quite problematic. It suggests that people think the data is going to be valuable for them, and if they have easier access to the data, that alone will make things better. That is not always true, so it’s potentially a recipe for some really unhappy times.
These effects depend on what you’re trying to get out of an activity or what your motivation is towards the activity going in. For example, if you are an avid runner trying to understand factors that might affect your performance across days, tracking can provide useful information because you’re trying to learn or change for the better across a defined timeline.
Where you often see more downside than upside is when you’re not trying to improve anything, or the thing that you’re tracking doesn’t lend itself to improvement—the tracked activity is not something that you’re trying to increase or change. In these situations, we see detrimental impacts in terms of undermining enjoyment. Instead of doing the activity for enjoyment, it is done for measurement—making things feel less fun and relaxing and more like a job to be done.
In my research, I tap into a very classic idea from social psychology about intrinsic motivation—that the addition or presence of external rewards for a behavior or activity can undermine intrinsic motivation. For instance, research done with kids shows that if they’re doing something fun, like coloring, and all of a sudden get an award for being good at coloring, there is a measurable shift in why they engage in the activity. In these studies, what we see is when they are given the opportunity to color during a period (but without the opportunity to earn an award), the kids no longer find coloring as fun and do less of it.
It’s the redirection of motivation from, “I enjoy this, so I’m doing it,” to, “I am doing it because I want to get an award.” Your motivation for simply enjoying the activity isn’t there anymore. When you’re genuinely happy, you’re not really thinking about whether you’re happy. I mean, to me, it relates a little bit to work on flow where the best experiences, the most rewarding experiences, are ones that you lose yourself in and you’re fully immersed.
Part of being immersed means you lose track of time, and you’re not thinking about your performative or any quantitative aspects of a behavior. For instance, I am very skeptical any time people are trying to track their happiness. Drawing attention, prompting introspection about whether you’re happy, it probably makes you feel less happy because, one, now you’re questioning whether you’re happy. Two, because taking a moment to ask yourself that question probably brings you out of a very happy experience that you might’ve been in. I’m very skeptical of many “happiness” interventions.
2) Since most consumer tracking devices’ perceived value comes from tracking and rewarding outcomes, in what ways could device innovators potentially improve their design to avoid setting consumers up for eventual failure?
One thing that device designers can certainly do is encourage consumers to be more intentional in their decisions to review any quantitative feedback. For example, that might mean making data harder to find and access (rather than easier to find).
If I must unlock something to see how many steps I’ve taken today, that means that when I check my steps, I really want to know that information. The data is there when I am truly interested in the feedback but does not cause a distraction because it’s casually consumable. When the presentation of data (as well as data alerts) is pervasive, it can have detrimental consequences, as I’ve shown in my work.
The Shapa scale has inspired some of my newer work looking at the frequency of checking data, as well as ease of access to data, in regard to what value a device is intended to provide you. The Shapa tried to eliminate noise by giving you a smooth average, but it’s also trying to reduce any negative impact of seeing fluctuations in your performance (which with weight is often due to factors outside of your control). It’s a nice example of someone intentionally thinking about the impact that receiving feedback can have on people’s experiences.
Defaults are also another easy way. So rather than automatically having all of these tracking features turned on, like how many steps you’re walking or things like that, have them all turned off and let people find them and turn them on if they want them.
3) In your work, you do a great job illustrating the tension between activities that we inherently perceive as fun and activities we perceive as work (in this context, work is defined as activities that are not pleasurable). Considering we tend to be less happy after work-like activities than activities we perceive as fun, what strategies can one use to bias activities towards fun, where we also would still like to see improvement (e.g., reading more books)?
I’ll give you two answers. The first is sort of my speculation. The second is some new research out of Cornell that you might find interesting. First, focusing on the more experiential aspects of an activity, especially if there are positive things there to focus on, can help people get more enjoyment from something rather than just having it feel like it’s a means to an end.
Second, if there’s an immediate positive focus on value, you can play with reward time. For example, you might do yoga to improve flexibility or long-term health in some future state ultimately, but in the present, focus instead on the peace of mind you feel while holding a pose. If we’re thinking about an activity’s future value, the activity can feel chore-like—just a means to an end. However, by moving up the reward timing of the experience, the receipt of reward, even if it’s just a reframing or even perhaps an external reward, it can be beneficial to enjoying the activity more. That research is by Kaitlin Woolley, an assistant professor of marketing at Cornell.
4) Most academic approaches to increasing subjective well-being rely on quantifying happiness. Given what you have learning about quantifying outcomes, what should individuals seeking greater happiness be mindful of if they are guided to think about their happiness in quantitative terms (considering measurement has been shown to reduce subject well-being)?
Connecting back to what we talked about earlier, finding ways to assess happiness qualitatively might be better—trying to draw an emotional expression of how you’re feeling right now—less tracking over time and more sort of being aware of yourself in the moment. When we begin to track things, we have naive expectations of seeing improvement. Just because we are tracking something and putting in some effort to change over time, we expect better outcomes. However, a positive outcome can be more or less likely depending on the domain of the thing that we’re tracking. With happiness, there are elements outside of our control, so measuring happiness quantitatively—with numbers—in the hopes of improvement could lead to negative consequences.
5) For those of us that have an interest in using IoT (the Internet of Things) and lifelogging for various methods of betterment, what suggestions do you have based on your research to set ourselves up for success (if we are determined to use tracking devices)?
I’ve had conversations with people who just fundamentally don’t believe my findings because they think that tracking brings so much happiness, reward, and value into their lives. They enjoy seeing how many steps they’ve taken a day, and they like competing with other people. So, clearly, there are ways for certain people to track activities and have tracking linked to positive outcomes.
I think being intentional about what you’re tracking, both in terms of the domain you are tracking and where you’re hoping to see improvement is important. Ask yourself, “Why and what is important to track? Is it something that I can control or not?” Being more intentional about the what, the why, and the how is important. Also, deciding what a meaningful interval for observation would be. If you’re hoping to observe some change, predetermine the appropriate interval, and then do not check your progress more frequently than that.
Being mindful of the what, the why, and the how should conceivably set the use of a tracking device up to support better the benefits of tracking in terms of learning and improving performance. You may still see some of the effects of tracking undermine your intrinsic motivation and sense of doing the activity for its own sake, but done right the benefits may outweigh the costs.
