Tasks that are part of a group are more tempting to complete.

<aside> ℹ️ Pseudo-set framing—arbitrarily grouping items or tasks together as part of an apparent “set”—motivates people to reach perceived completion points.

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This fascinating research was published 3 years ago by IESE and Harvard researchers and builds on Gestalt psychology (“the whole is greater than its parts”) - first studied over 100 years ago.

It shows us how we can influence people to take more, or less, actions (e.g. reading or buying something, going to the gym) by grouping them into sets that feel ‘complete’.

Recommendation

Create and communicate clear ‘pseudo-sets’ to persuade people to complete a certain number of tasks (you’ve read 1 out of 4), encourage a specific number of donations (donate 6 packs, 1 for each family member), or buy a group of products (collect all 5 candles).

People will stop at the reference point you set, but they are much more likely to reach it rather than abandoning earlier.

For example, a gym could encourage members to workout 2 times per week, enough to keep paying the subscription, but not too much that it becomes overcrowded.

Effects

• Pseudo-sets are groups of tasks or items that when reached give a sense of ‘completeness’ (e.g. filling a pie chart, 100% completion).
• They encourage people to complete exact sets (or multiple of them) of tasks or items, without changing the tasks or incentives.
• The effect works whether the pseudo-sets have meaning (e.g. write 4 letters, because we ship them in batches of 4), or none at all (e.g. a 4 part pie chart counting the number of pages read on the BBC news website, would make it much more likely that people read multiples of 4, or stop at the first 4).
• It works to encourage moderate effort, but if the goal is too high the effect backfires. People will be dissatisfied - and abandon - before they even start.

Why it works

• Framing tasks or items in pseudo-sets works by (a) conveying the notion of a larger group or entity, which (b) increases perceptions of incompleteness, and in turn (c) activates people’s desire for completeness.
• We naturally find complete, cohesive units to be symbolic and meaningful, so we strive to achieve them. Think of the slight annoyance you may feel when buying a ‘6 pack’ of sodas with 1 missing.
• If the goal is too high to achieve (e.g. workout 10 times this week), we expect we won’t reach a satisfying endpoint - so we won’t even start it.

Limitations

• The researchers ran several experiments, and similar human behaviors have been well researched in the past decades. This study is widely applicable.
• The main limitation to keep in mind is that this is a nudge to tweak a behavior, not drastically change it. Don’t expect to sell 3x the amount of laptops by selling them in sets of 3 ‘collectible’ colors (the effort required vs value received for something like that is on vastly different levels).