People use enjoyment, not time spent, to measure goal progress

It stands to reason that the longer or more diligently you work at something, the better you get at it. But researchers from the Cornell SC Johnson College of Business found that consumers don't necessarily see it that way.

In nine studies, the research team - co-authored by Kaitlin Woolley '12, professor of marketing at the Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management, and Yuchen Wu, doctoral student in marketing - found that people relied more on the enjoyment they derived from the activity, and less on perceived or actual time spent in it, when gauging their progress toward a goal.

"Whether you feel good or not should not influence your progress judgments as much as the influence of time spent, but we found the opposite to be true," Wu said. "People decide whether they are making progress or not simply based on how they feel during the pursuit."

Their paper, "The Role of Time and Enjoyment in Consumers' Goal Progress Perceptions," is accepted for publication in the Journal of the Association for Consumer Research. Former Johnson School postdoctoral researcher Laura Giurge, now an assistant professor of behavioral science at the London School of Economics, is also a co-author.

Woolley said their initial expectation was that people intuitively would value time spent at a task over any perceived enjoyment.

"You see people staying late at work, and maybe they're not really doing a lot, but they're putting in the time," she said. "So we thought maybe people do think simply putting in the time is going to lead to progress. We were unsure how it was going to play out, and we were surprised that time spent wasn't a stronger predictor of perceived progress."

The group's first four studies examined whether time investment or enjoyment more strongly predicts perceived progress across three areas - fitness, academic and career. For example, in the first study, 250 participants recruited from campus gyms listed a planned workout; the researchers recorded participants' workout enjoyment, time spent exercising, and judgments of progress toward a fitness goal. In all four studies, enjoyment was a stronger predictor of perceived goal progress than time spent.

All other studies manipulated enjoyment and revealed similar results. In the third study, for example, 121 gym-goers were assigned to spend seven minutes walking on a treadmill, in either a higher- or lower-enjoyment condition. In the higher, the treadmill was set at 2.5 miles per hour, with a music video playing; in the lower, the speed was 3.5 mph, with no video.

People in the higher-enjoyment condition believed they made more progress toward their daily step goals, despite actually putting in fewer steps.

"Walking speed can be hard to judge," Woolley said. "It might be hard to know that I've made progress based on the amount of time I put into it, but I can feel like, 'Is this fun? Or do I feel like the time is dragging?' and that then ends up serving as a cue for progress."

To turn off the effect, another study involved playing down the enjoyment aspect and highlighting the benefits of investing time toward a goal. It proved, she said, that in some circumstances, time can trump enjoyment.

"There are situations where the experience maybe is not enjoyable, and that you have to just show up and put in the time," Woolley said. "Our findings generally are saying that you're going to feel more progress and more motivation when the activity is enjoyable. But for situations that are not enjoyable, you can strengthen the time-progress link to increase motivation from time spent."

Using enjoyment as a proxy for goal progress is a double-edged sword, Wu said.

"Feeling that you made progress is motivating," she said, "so for products like fitness apps and online learning platforms, enjoyment strategies such as gamification can both attract customers and retain them. If you're enjoying the activity, you're making progress and you're more confident. You want to continue.

"But if you focus only on enjoyment, there's a chance you miss out on investing enough time," she said. "You feel like, 'OK, I've done a lot," when actually, maybe you have not."

This research was supported by a grant from the Cornell Center for Social Sciences.