The motivating effect of the ‘Almost complete feeling’

It was almost 30 seconds into Plank Pose (called ‘Dhandasan’ in Yoga) in my Yoga practice this morning. It felt the entire weight of the world was on my arms. I could not bear it any longer. I was just going to drop my knees. Just then Jeevita, our Yoga trainer, started the countdown of 5. Suddenly I had an urge to complete. I had to just hold on until the countdown of 5 was completed. I moved my focus from pain to the countdown itself, held on until it was complete. Once completed, I felt the satisfying effect of completion, a feeling of victory.

Walking out of the class, I started reflecting on my behaviour. What made me want to complete the countdown, in spite of excruciating pain. I would like to talk about some of the psychology lessons, from my past readings, which I think could explain my behaviour.

Endowed Progress Effect : “A phenomenon that increases people’s motivation as they are nearing the goal.”

I think in my case the countdown set a goal (to complete) and introduced an ‘almost complete feeling’ because countdown was only of 5. We are already subject to the endowed progress effect my multiple websites, without recognising it. Let me discuss the famous example of LinkedIn’s profile completion, cited by Stephen P. Anderson in his wonderful book ‘Seductive Interaction Design’

LinkedIn encourages the users to supply additional profile information. In the earlier version (shown above) as users completed each step, the meter advanced giving a sense of progress and suggested the progress that could be achieved just by adding one more simple information. I got addicted to this and brought my profile to near completeness, as you can see below.

LinkedIn has now ditched its numerical progress scale, but rather has introduced an exponential scale, wherein initially(for new users) the scale progresses rapidly and eventually as the user advances, progress becomes tough to achieve thereby giving the feeing of ‘almost complete’ for real long. As you can see from my profile, I am almost complete but not yet. I have to probably write a Technical paper and file a patent to complete the profile.

Rewards of the Self

Different disciplines of Psychology suggests that we Humans are reward seekers. Especially unpredictable, variable rewards have a great motivating effect. The field of NeuroEconomics says that Nuclear Accumbens of our brain responds to variable rewards, and Dopamine is the reward chemical. (My observations on variable rewards and dopamine effect on myself can be a topic of discussion for some other day). In my Yoga case, my motivation was probably compounded by the fact that, Jeevita does not start the count down all the time for all poses. It is totally random.

Nir Eyal in his book How to Build Habit-Forming Products explains that variable rewards can be classified into three type: Rewards of the Tribe, Rewards of the Hunt, Rewards of the Self.

I think sense of completing the plank pose, a personal form of gratification, is a rewards of the Self. It says we are driven to conquer obstacles, pursue a task to completion. For more on types of rewards you can read here.

Pursuit of Mastery

Daniel Pink, in his book Drive explains people are motivated by Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose. Mastery means that people want to get better at what they do as long as it matters to them. You can get summary of this book here.

In the case of my Yoga practice, completing the pose, gave me a sense of mastery (progress in mastery to be be precise) and allowed me to compare myself to other yoga practitioners(, especially the pretty ladies, No.. I am not bringing Evolutionary Psychology Today), far ahead than me in the practice, at least in this pose.

Some caveats (For the Psychology Engineers)

A) Not all ‘personality types’ may be equally motivated by this feeling of ‘almost complete’. Let us consider Bartle’s Player Types, a famous segregation of personality types used in Games and Gamifications.

I think ‘Achiever’ and ‘Explorer’ type of personalities will be motivated more than other types by this feeling. For more on Bartle’s personality types you can read here.

B) Instead of generating ‘almost complete’ feeling, if the design ends up giving ‘so much to complete’ feeling, it will immediately discourage the user. In my case if Jeevita had started a countdown of say 15, I am sure within no time I would have given up. Many gamification systems recognise this fact. So in Leaderboards, instead of comparing the user on an absolute scale (If a user sees he is in 2000th position and no way he is going to win, he will likely give up), he will be compared with his nearest competitors. He will be told how close he is to beat the person one up in the leaderboard.

So there are multiple explanations in behavioural psychology to the motivating effect I observed in myself. They could have contributed towards it, to varying extents. Equipped with this knowledge of motivation, let us see how best to put it for use in Mankind’s betterment.

Comments and feedbacks are welcome.