The Zeigarnik Effect
An unfinished task keeps tugging at your attention until you finish it. Or until you write down exactly how, when and where you will. The second one turned out to work just as well.
The Goal-Gradient Effect
Coffee buyers sped up with every stamp on a loyalty card, then slowed right back down once they started a fresh one. Effort follows distance to the finish line.
Goodhart's Law at Work
When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. Wells Fargo showed how far that goes. The fix is to watch the signals nobody can push on directly.
The Benjamin Franklin Effect
People tend to like you more after doing you a favor, not less. One detail matters: the effect showed up only when the person was asked directly.
The Köhler Effect
Groups usually dampen individual effort. Under one specific condition they raise it, and the person who gains the most is the one least able on the task.
Recovery Doesn't Batch
Time off reliably lifts wellbeing, and the lift is largely gone two to three weeks after returning. That says less about vacation than about what companies stack on top of it.
Let Them Meet the Person They Helped
Callers who spent five minutes with one scholarship student were raising 171 percent more money a month later. The group who only read his letter didn't move at all.
Recognition Works on the People Who Don't Get It
Unannounced thank-you cards raised output on a data-entry shift. Most of the gain came from the people who didn't receive one.
You Cannot Kill Your Own Project
Handed $20 million and a failing project, the people who made the original call put $13 million behind it. Everyone else put in $9 million. The person best placed to see a failure is the one who can least afford to name it.
The 19-Word Note
One sentence attached to critical feedback lifted revision rates from 17 to 71 percent among the students who trusted the institution least. It runs 19 words.
The Endowed Progress Effect
Two loyalty cards, eight car washes of real work either way. The card that arrived with two stamps already filled in got completed almost twice as often.
Competence Earns the Right to Fumble
A quiz contestant knocked over his coffee on tape. It made the expert more likeable and the mediocre contestant less so. That asymmetry is the part leadership advice about vulnerability keeps dropping.