The value of mere completion.

Abstract

The positivity of goal completion is reinforced through everyday experiences of social praise and instrumental reward. Here we investigated whether, in line with this self-regulatory emphasis, people value completion opportunities in and of themselves. Across six experiments we found that adding an arbitrary completion opportunity to a lower-reward task increased the likelihood that participants would choose to work on that task over a higher-reward alternative that did not offer a completion opportunity. This occurred for extrinsic reward tradeoffs (Experiments 1, 3, 4, and 5) and intrinsic reward tradeoffs (Experiments 2 and 6), and it persisted even when participants explicitly noted the rewards of each task (Experiment 3). We sought but did not find evidence that the tendency is moderated by participants' stable or momentary level of concern with monitoring multiple responsibilities (Experiments 4 and 5, respectively). We did find that the opportunity to complete the final step in a sequence was particularly attractive: Setting the lower-reward task closer to completion (but with completion still out of reach) did increase its choice share, but setting the lower-reward task with completion distinctly in reach increased its choice share even more (Experiment 6). Together, the experiments imply that people sometimes behave as if they value completion itself. In everyday life, the allure of mere completion may influence the tradeoffs people make when prioritizing their goals. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).