Kaitlin Woolley is an Assistant Professor of Marketing at the SC Johnson Cornell College of Business. She researches consumer motivation and goal pursuit, focusing on understanding what consumers value when pursuing their goals and how to use this to increase goal persistence.
Professor Woolley’s work has been published in top-tier academic journals, including the Journal of Consumer Research and the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Her research has been featured in publications such as The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times.
1) In multiple studies, you and others have found that the presence of an immediate reward (when we are in the process of pursuing a goal) makes us persist longer, making it more likely that our goal gets achieved. If someone wants to benefit from your findings, what are the basic tenets for maximizing this strategy’s effectiveness?
We break this down in three ways. The first approach is one you can apply before you start an activity, when you are making a choice between different options. At this point – try and choose the option that you find immediately rewarding. In one study (available here), we prompt people to think about choosing a workout that they find fun or choosing a workout that they specifically find useful for their health goals. The participants picked from a list of preselected workouts that are all equally difficult, but the idea is that when you’re choosing within that subset of activities, choosing for “fun” is going to help you achieve your goal. You’re factoring in enjoyment at that point, which is motivating. We found that choosing for fun helped people stick with the exercise longer. Since each workout option was equally difficult, that means that people were actually working longer towards their long-term fitness goals. The idea here is that when you’re making a choice, ask yourself, “Are there options available for me to choose and achieve my goal in a way that makes it fun along the way?”
The second option is to think about whether there are aspects of that activity you are working on that you find interesting and rewarding – if so, try to focus on those to increase your motivation. If you’re in a 10,000 step challenge at work, for instance, there may be aspects of walking that you enjoy, such as, being outside or getting physical activity. Or maybe you like competing with friends; you can focus on aspects of the activity that you enjoy to boost your motivation.
So ask yourself, are there aspects that I inherently enjoy about this activity that I can focus on? Research that others and I have done shows that if there are aspects of your job, or tasks you need to do, that you really enjoy, thinking and focusing on what you find enjoyable about these activities can help you stick with the activity for longer.
The third option is for those activities that are just not your cup of tea, and where you don’t really have the opportunity to choose something better. If there is nothing about the activity that you can focus on to make it fun, thinking about the experience itself can be demotivating. In these instances, there are ways that you can add in immediate rewards. By immediate rewards, I mean something that’s not internal to the activity, but that you can add to what you are doing to make it more enjoyable, and thus easier to stick with.
In one study we conducted in a high school in Florida, we looked at how immediate rewards could help students persist in completing math exercises. We added in as many fun things as we could think of to make a math class more exciting. For example, we gave students fun colored pens, and pencils – things that could be fun for them to use. We also gave them snacks, and we had the teacher play some music. The elements that we added, you might think could distract students because they are fun (are students doodling with the pens, or are they doing math?) But we found making the experience for students more fun helped them to persist—they actually stuck with the math and tried to work through a bit more of the work.
I consider this a little bit like cheating because these results are separate from the activity itself. It’s about asking yourself, “how can I transform the activity into something better by adding an immediate reward?”
Those are my three tips for making your goals stick:
- Choosing for fun.
- Focusing on fun if it’s already there.
- Trying to add in fun to the extent that you can if it’s not already present.
2) When using immediate rewards, what are the considerations one should think through regarding intrinsic and extrinsic motivation?
There’s a lot of work on how external incentives can undermine intrinsic motivation. What I’ve been trying to unpack is, when will incentives undermine intrinsic motivation? And, when might they actually help intrinsic motivation?
The classic work on this examined students engaging in a puzzle task or coloring assignment absent a reward. At that point, they’re doing puzzles or coloring because they enjoy it or because of the benefit of self-expression (from coloring). If you introduce an external reward, now all of a sudden, the child considers, “Oh, I guess there’s another reason why I’m doing this activity. Maybe before, I was just enjoying it. Now, I’m doing it for a reward.” Then, when you take that reward away, you’re taking away one of those goals, which is demotivating.
When you give someone a goal and then take it away, it can undermine the reason why they thought they were doing the activity in the first place. “I was doing it initially for self-expression; now I’m doing it for a reward. And now that you’ve taken that reward away, why should I keep going?” Incentives get a bad rep for that reason; people hear about these findings and apply it to contexts where it doesn’t apply. But the undermining effect is specific to activities that are 1. Interesting to begin with, and 2. Not already associated with rewards.
What we’ve been looking at is how incentives can help when maybe, interest isn’t there in the first place, or for activities that you expect to be rewarded for. Take a work task—people can feel intrinsic pleasure in their work, but also work for extrinsic rewards. In this case, providing extra bonuses or providing earlier bonuses is unlikely to undermining interest, and can even enhance it. This type of experimentation is not going to hurt people’s interest because they’re already working in part for that external incentive.
In our studies, we manipulated when the timing of the reward will be, with the idea that if you can make a reward more immediate and arriving closer in time to the activity, you may be able to increase enjoyment from the activity. In this case, you’re working for an outcome, and now that outcome is arriving sooner. An earlier reward means you achieve the goal (of the activity) much quicker, which is motivating. Giving rewards when they’re not expected can be problematic because people might recharacterize the reason that they were doing the activity in the first place. But when you expect a reward – getting it sooner is motivating.
This relates to other classic work showing how norms for payment affect motivation. If there’s a norm to get paid and I pay you, then you are intrinsically motivated. But if I don’t pay you and there’s a payment norm, you are demotivated and question, “Why didn’t I get paid?” Then there’s the instance where you don’t expect the reward, and you get paid. And that is similar to the earlier example of students doing puzzles/children coloring – rewarding someone who doesn’t expect a reward can undermine intrinsic motivation.
If you want to use rewards to motivate people, the first question to ask is whether rewards expected or not (in this context)? If rewards are expected, you can provide earlier rewards to increase intrinsic motivation. Earlier rewards lead people to feel that pursuing the activity achieves the goal – the activity becomes an end in itself (rather than a means to an end), which is the definition of intrinsic motivation.
3) Why has immediate gratification gotten such a bad rap? On the assumption there are some good reasons, if we are going to use immediate rewards as a motivational tool, what landmines should we be mindful of?
Consider a choice between buying a $500 TV today or saving $500 for my retirement. Being impulsive and choosing that immediately gratifying option will not set myself up well for the future. The classic research on the benefits of immediate gratification comes from Walter Mischel and the marshmallow studies—he showed that children who could wait some amount of time for a delayed reward in the future (e.g., a second marshmallow), their behavior was predictive of a number of positive future outcomes in terms of their ability to regulate themselves.
As such, I would say impulse control is important. A lot of decisions we make involve these trade-offs between, “Do I choose the short-term gain now or the long-term gain later?”
What I do in my research is flip that conflict on its head. We don’t ask whether immediate gratification comes at the cost of an important long-term outcome. Instead, we encourage people to harness the fact that they are present bias, and care about immediate outcomes, to help them persist in their goals.
For example, I ask people to focus on the immediate rewards of healthy food (i.e., the tastiness of apples or carrots). We don’t ask people when they are choosing a snack to think about what’s going to be tasty. In that scenario, they might go for the candy instead of the apple! Limiting the choice upfront, say, choosing between an apple and a banana (two healthy options), you can then choose the tastiest option given your preferences. So going for the “immediately gratifying” option allows you to have something you enjoy, but still stick to your health goals.
4) There seems to be a lot of conflicting thoughts on hedonic consumption, willpower, and ego depletion. Specifically, the idea that if we can make something more pleasurable, we have a higher chance of performing better, or making a better choice, sometime in the future. From your vantage point, what about ego depletion and willpower is compelling, and what is potentially a misconception?
The idea here is that to make wise choices in line with your long-term goal may require exerting a lot of effort to resist temptation. If you have a plate of cookies in front of you, and you’re trying to use your willpower to say no to those cookies, you have a strong internal conflict: On the one hand, part of you wants to eat the cookie, and on the other hand, eating the cookie does not align with your diet or health goals. In this situation, for willpower to be successful, you have to have both the ability and the motivation not to eat the cookie. That can be a challenging situation, especially because we’re really good at convincing ourselves that we deserve the cookie!
Willpower in this context is how to resist temptation by using effort. My work has been exploring how you can make healthier choices—removing that effort component—because using effort (sometimes exerted as willpower) can fail, and it might not be the most successful way to set yourself up for successfully achieving long-term goals. This idea is in line with some recent research on choice architecture—whether you can create situations that remove the temptation in the first place. For example, simply not buying cookies at the store so they aren’t in your house tempting you to eat them.
There’s some work showing that people who have really good self-control habits tend to be the type of people who are not tempted easily. So, using the cookie example, implicitly they don’t see eating the cookie as attractive. And so, it’s not as challenging for them to say no to eating the cookie. I’m trying to create situations like these for people, where choosing the healthy option becomes easier and less of a struggle. I suggest that by having people think about healthy choices as coming with beneficial components (i.e., good taste), this can help them choose in line with health without requiring them to exert a lot of willpower.
Regarding studying willpower, people are re-examining and realizing the evidence may not be as strong as they thought. The main idea behind willpower (and ego depletion) research – that people get tired – I would say is true. What’s less clear is what exactly leads to fatigue, and why it makes people more likely to indulge. But after a long day, is it going to be harder for you to resist a brownie than earlier in the day? Probably.
The goal of my work is to circumvent the need to exert willpower in the first place. Some of the earlier examples I mentioned focused on questions such as, “if exercise isn’t fun for you, how can you make it more fun?” But one cautionary example I have for this is, if you are trying to power through a paper and you’re eating candy to make the paper writing more enjoyable, the candy might actually help you write the paper, but is that behavior going to undermine another goal (e.g., health goal)? The challenge then becomes finding a reward that’s actually going to be powerful and motivating but will also help you with any other number of goals that you have. That’s where it can get tricky. It’s very easy to make activities more enjoyable, which helps you persist. But in doing so, you need to ask whether you are undermining other goals that you have for yourself.
5) Given that what is fun, rewarding, and/or pleasurable to one person may not be to the next, what advice do you have for anyone trying to implement an immediate reward strategy for a group of people (trying to reach a collective goal)?
I love this question. I have the Peloton app. I don’t have a Peloton itself, but I find their workouts really motivating because of the group dynamic. The music is not what I would listen to on my own. Often I ask myself, do I go and do the Peloton as is, or do I listen to my own music?
I think there are two things. One, if you can give people the ability to customize (within reason to avoid the paradox of choice), it might be helpful—giving people choice and flexibility can help them find options best matched to their preferences. For instance, some companies are letting people set their own work hours—this lets people operate within their own set of preferences for when they work best.
Two, harness the group dynamic. This is not from my own research, but there are three papers I can point you to that have looked at motivation from others, and how that can help with intrinsic motivation.
- The first is coming from Rachel Gershon from UC San Diego and colleagues. She shows the benefits of social engagement for health behavior – if you have a workout buddy, that person can hold you accountable and increase workout enjoyment. Using my Peloton example, if I don’t like the song, but my friends are “virtually” on the app and we are running to the song together, I may look past my dislike for the song and focus more on, “Okay, we’re in this together.” Group settings like these are motivating because other people hold us accountable and can make takes more engaging.
- Even if you are not working with others, look for cues of togetherness can increase intrinsic motivation. This finding comes from Greg Walton at Stanford and Priyanka Carr. If you’re doing a work task independently, but other people are also working on it independently, you can think about how you’re jointly working on the task together even if you are doing the work apart. They found focusing on a sense of togetherness, even if not really working together with others, can increase intrinsic motivation and help people persist.
- Another way to motivate people, drawing on the social dynamic, is to think about who you work for—research by Jochen Menges from the University of Zurich (along with additional colleagues) find that people who may not enjoy their work can experience motivation by thinking about how their work supports their family. Those who benefit the most from this are those who enjoy their work less. Connecting work to how it helps provide for one’s family, that’s an immediate benefit that I think most people feel and subscribe to, and can be motivating. Family motivation is a goal that many people at work may hold, and can be harnessed to boost motivation.
The truth is you’re not likely going to find that one reward for everyone that’s effective, but there are ways to help support people toward a collective goal.