Concept
Endowed Progress Effect
motivation completion loyalty
People are more likely to complete a task — and to put in more effort doing so — if they're made to feel they've already made progress toward it, even when that "progress" required no real effort of their own.
Nathalie Nahai illustrates with a loyalty-card comparison: one group is given a card requiring 8 stamps for a free coffee; another is given a 10-stamp card with 2 stamps already punched in. Both groups objectively still need to collect 8 more coffees, but the pre-punched group completes the card far more often, because they perceive themselves as having already started rather than starting from zero (see Loyalty Card Endowed Progress Study).
The founding academic study, cited by name with precise figures (Episode 159). Patrick Fagan cites the original 2006 car-wash loyalty-card study directly: with an 8-stamp card starting empty, 19% of customers bought enough car washes to fill it. With a 10-stamp card that already had 2 stamps applied before the customer received it — objectively identical remaining effort, 8 more washes either way — 34% of customers filled the card, nearly double the completion rate.
The same logic works with zero real effort invested at all — a website pop-up telling a passive browser "50% — you're nearly there!" measurably lifted completion of an email-capture form on the site Silicon Reel, despite the visitor not having done anything to earn that 50%.
The identical loyalty-card example resurfaces in the show's year-end "best of" recap, retold under the looser label "endowment effect" — the underlying mechanism described is unchanged.
A companion field experiment, measuring completion speed rather than completion rate (Episode 248). Researchers Ran Kivetz, Oleg Urminsky, and Yuhuang Hsiang ran a related New York cafe experiment: customers given a 12-slot coffee card with 2 slots pre-filled (still requiring 10 purchases, identical to a plain 10-slot card) completed their purchases in 12.7 days on average, versus 15.6 days for customers with the plain card — 20% faster completion for an identical objective task (see Kivetz Urminsky Hsiang Cafe Coffee-Stamp Study (2006)).
Richard Chataway built the same mechanism into a smoking-cessation app: as personalized stats (money saved, tar avoided, days smoke-free) accumulated on every open, users felt they'd already invested in a streak worth protecting and continuing — one of several nudges stacked into the app's design (see My Quit Buddy Smoking Cessation App).
Discussed in
- Episode 16 — 16- What makes a good website
- Episode 18 — 18- 8 nudges you need in 2020
- Episode 24 — 24- How to nudge within your business
- Episode 69 — 69- Reciprocity - How one nudge saved 246-184 lives (retold with a 7-of-9-stamps framing; see note on Loyalty Card Endowed Progress Study)
- Episode 159 — 159-six-proven-principles-to-persuade-anyone (original study cited by name with precise figures)
- Episode 248 — 248-three-tricks-super-mario-uses-to-keep-gamers-hooked (Kivetz Urminsky Hsiang cafe coffee-stamp study)