CCN Colloquium: "Goal steadiness and motivation"

Rarely does the path to goal accomplishment look perfect. Making progress on everyday goals is often unsteady, in that each unit of effort or time spent generates unequal results. In this research, we examine how progress steadiness affects motivation. Although unsteady goal progress is common, we suggest that goal pursuers find it discouraging. We hypothesize that even when goal progress is equal in amount and speed, unsteady (vs. steady) progress decreases people's motivation and increases quitting. Across a variety of goal domains, findings from vignette experiments, a recall study, and real-time experiments support these hypotheses. We lay out a theoretical model of how we expect steadiness to affect motivation, and test aspects of the model throughout the studies, finding boundary conditions such as ambiguity of goal attainability (Study 3) and progress abstraction (Study 4). Finally, we demonstrate that manipulations targeting expectations about progress steadiness can reduce the negative effects of unsteady progress (Study 5). These results are the first to consider how progress steadiness can affect motivation.