Researchers Ayelet Fishbach and Christopher Hsee, from the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago, and Professor Luxi Shen, from the University of Hong Kong, have carried out a comparative analysis of the time, money and effort that people invest to get a reward established in advance compared to the one they use to achieve an uncertain one, and they found that the latter was more motivating.
In recent times, uncertainty has a bad name. Hundreds of articles have been written in recent years on the negative effects that insecurity has brought to consumers, markets and the economy in general. But according to the study of the aforementioned experts, published in the Journal of Consumer Research , this lack of certainty can act as an incentive.
In one of Fishbach, Hsee, and Shen’s experiments, a group of college students had to drink a large amount of water in two minutes. Some of them had been offered $ 2 if they completed the task, while the rest were promised “one or two dollars,” without specifying. Well, there were more of the latter, who were not sure what reward they would get, who drank all the water. The researchers call this phenomenon the effect of motivating uncertainty.
Fishbach, Hsee, and Shen believe that it is due to the stimulus of turning the unknown into the known or the uncertain into the true, which is a positive and encouraging experience. Because people are curious and excited to find out what they can accomplish, striving to do so makes the task more of a game than of actual work.
In another experiment, volunteers had to bid on eBay auctions. Half of them had to focus on the bidding process, while the others looked at the end result. Well, the former risked more money for an uncertain reward and enjoyed the full experience more , which they found more exciting than the other group of bidders.
