Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
A milestone helps people finish
One proposal applies it to the problem of people not finishing a course of antibiotics. Instead of one identical run of pills, the course changes color partway through, so the person meets a visible midpoint instead of a single long stretch.
The likelihood of reaching the end is much greater with a milestone in the middle. It is psychology used on a problem few people had thought of as a psychological one.
Why does motivation sag in the middle?
In a 2011 paper titled Stuck in the Middle, Andrea Bonezzi, C. Miguel Brendl, and Matteo De Angelis argued that people judge progress relative to the start and the end of a goal. The middle sits far from both, so each step there feels small. Their account predicts a dip in motivation halfway through, and their experiments found it. The paper appeared in the journal Psychological Science.
Why do people speed up near the finish?
The psychologist Clark Hull described the goal-gradient hypothesis in 1932 after watching rats run faster the closer they got to food at the end of a maze. In 2006, Ran Kivetz, Oleg Urminsky, and Yuhuang Zheng found the same pattern in people: coffee shop customers with a loyalty card bought more often as they neared a free coffee. Their study was published in the Journal of Marketing Research.