
The illusion of progress lights a fire - jayliew
http://mindhacks.com/2010/07/20/the-illusion-of-progress-lights-a-fire/
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tobtoh
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
Huh? Don't you get all the carwash vouchers when you pay? Which one is the
"free" one?

~~~
InclinedPlane
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.

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zach
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
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.)

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alwaysinshade
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=publi...](https://marketing.wharton.upenn.edu/files/?whdmsaction=public:main.file&fileID=283)

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enpyre
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
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.

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DannoHung
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
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.

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6ren
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.

~~~
danmaz74
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
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.

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reedlaw
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
This is why the price on the shelf at most supermarkets is the loyalty card
price.

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

~~~
jason_shah
"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!"

~~~
shrikant
IOW, as an earlier manager of mine would say, "Set low expectations, and
exceed them."

I am still ambivalent about that, though.

~~~
pizza
My dad always says the way to make people happy is to under-promise and over-
deliver.

~~~
Evbn
and that's one of amazon.com's official mottos.

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Apocryphon
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.

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dhughes
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
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).

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jrgnsd
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.

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

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ktizo
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?

~~~
gojomo
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.)

~~~
jbm
> 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

I feel your statement is too pat. Why is that not unethical? Based on what
ethical pattern?

If the basis of ethics is being truthful, it would seem that ease of
understanding is also an important part of ethics. Subconscious manipulation
and influence seems to be at odds with that goal.

Perhaps such manipulations is inevitable in a marketplace where everyone
engages in unethical mental manipulation, but that does not make it ethical.

~~~
gojomo
But do we even know the 2/12 variant is worse on "ease of understanding"?
Maybe it's more understandable, and congruent with the buyer's real best
interest, because it's not subject to an endpoint/inertia-of-zero bias that
depresses sales from the 0/10 case.

Note that these same sorts of perceptual influences are also the basis for all
the do-gooder initiatives that get proposed by Richard Thaler and Cass
Sunstein in _Nudge_. (So in fact I would grant there is at least one more
dimension beyond deception: is the influence clearly against someone's
interest? But there should be no presumption that whatever they would have
done without the influence was the purest expression of their interests.)

Part of my ethical criteria is: what rules work? Part of 'work' is that they
are evaluable. An accusation of undue influence, even though every observable
aspect of a communication is true and fully disclosed, is very hard to
evaluate. It's not very useful as a rule for deciding what one can do, or for
assessing 'guilt' after the fact.

Using a bit of communication that is false on its face is easy to evaluate.
It's fraud, and it's clearly unethical.

'Manipulation' is a loaded term. It just means "influence we don't like". In a
commercial setting, reasonable people already assume a seller is crafting
their communication to increase sales. Calling cleverly-crafted commercial
influence 'unethical manipulation', even when it remains true in all
observable aspects, overloads and dilutes the idea of what's ethical.

Is A/B testing that results in color, wording, and layout changes that
increase sales 'unethical manipulation'? Perhaps if it goes so far, in total
effect, as to create a tangibly false idea in the customer's minds. But not
simply because it incrementally nudges someone towards a purchase.

