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The Brainy Business | Understanding the Psychology of Why People Buy | Behavioral Economics
467. The Streak End Rule: Revolutionizing Motivation with Polly Kang
00:49:53
In this episode of The Brainy Business podcast, Melina Palmer welcomes Dr. Polly Kang, a postdoctoral scholar at INSEAD, to explore the fascinating "streak end rule" and its implications for motivation and job satisfaction. Polly's research delves...
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- [00:00]
Melina Palmer
Welcome to episode 467 of the Brainy Business Understanding the Psychology of why People Buy. In today's episode, I'm excited to introduce you to Dr. Polly Kang. Ready? Let's get started.
- [00:17]
You are listening to the Brainy Business Podcast where we dig into the psychology of why people buy and help you incorporate behavioral economics into your business, making it more brain friendly. Now, here's your host, Melina Palmer.
- [00:33]
Dr. Polly Kang
Hello.
- [00:34]
Melina Palmer
Hello everyone. My name is Melina Palmer and I want to welcome you to the Brainy Business Podcast.
- [00:40]
Dr. Polly Kang
How do you approach your workday? Do you like to tackle the low.
- [00:43]
Melina Palmer
Hanging fruit first to free your mind.
- [00:45]
Dr. Polly Kang
For the bigger stuff?
- [00:47]
Melina Palmer
Or are you more of an eat the frog person that front loads all.
- [00:51]
Dr. Polly Kang
Of your hard tasks?
- [00:52]
Melina Palmer
As it turns out, neither of those.
- [00:54]
Dr. Polly Kang
Is your best strategy. So what should you do?
- [00:58]
Melina Palmer
Thankfully, my guest today has the answers. Now today I'm joined by Dr. Polly Kang. Polly is a postdoctoral scholar at INSEAD. She holds a PhD in operations, information and decisions from Wharton, an MA in statistics from Wharton, and a BSBA in economics and Public Policy from Duke. She theorizes and tests how feelings drive decisions in negotiations and organizations and how people can lead more productive, generous and fulfilling lives. In particular, most of her work combines massive data sets with cutting edge quantitative tools from statistics, econometrics and machine learning to identify how contextual factors causally influence motivation and behavior in natural field settings using natural field experiments and quasi experiments. Her research is published in top academic outlets such as Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes and has been covered by major media outlets such as Time. Today we're discussing one of her key papers on the Streak end rule. Really quickly, before we get into the conversation, I want to be sure you know that there are links in the show notes for my top related past episodes and books, ways to get in touch with Polly and myself, and more. It's all within the app you're listening to and@the brainybusiness.com 467. Now let's jump right in. Dr. Polly Kang, welcome to the Brainy Business Podcast.
- [02:35]
Dr. Polly Kang
Thank you so much for having me.
- [02:37]
Melina Palmer
Absolutely.
- [02:38]
Dr. Polly Kang
I am so delighted to be chatting with you today about your amazing work. For everyone who doesn't yet know you, can you share a little bit about yourself and the work that you do?
- [02:48]
Yes, of course. My name is Polly King and I got my PhD from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. I'm currently a postdoctoral research at insead. I theorize and test how feelings drive decisions, negotiations and organizations. And I want to help people lead more productive, generous and fulfilling lives. And most of the work that I do combines massive data sets with cutting edge tools from econometrics, machine learning, and statistics. And I try to identify how psychological factors causally influence motivation and behavior in natural field settings. So like real work situations, you know, like real hospitals and things like that. And I generally use natural field experiments and quasi experiments. So natural field experiments take advantage of randomization that happens as a natural part of work. So for instance, if an organization randomly assigns their workers to different tasks, then that randomization lets us get causality. The other way that I do research is by using quasi experimental methods. And that's when we identify plausibly random kind of shocks, you know, like sunlight or financial market performance and things like that, and see how these types of things causally influence people's behaviors.
- [04:19]
Love all of that and that you're using new technologies to be able to really revolutionize work. And I know we talked about in our pre conversation about how, you know, a lot of the reason that this hadn't been done before was because it couldn't have been done before. And there are a couple different reasons for that. Can you share a little bit about, you know, what's been made possible based on, you know, the, the times that, that we're in and what exists?
- [04:51]
Yeah, of course. Thank you for asking that question. So basically for the project and the research that we'll be talking about today, the data set comes from a text based crisis hotline. So what this means is that every person's behavior, so you know, like every time they send a message to someone, it's all timestamped. What this means is that there is a lot of, it's very, very granular data. And you have all of the data and it's all timestamp, which is magical, versus when people used to come into work or go into a call center to take phone calls, you don't have automatically timestamped data and you can't observe every worker's every behavior. So because of the technological advances, we have this access to this amazing granular data where an entire organization can have granular data on every single worker. And in our case, we're working with a nonprofit organization who had data on over 14,000 volunteers that we observe over five years. So we have around like 28 million observations. And these are, you know, it's very good quality data. The second thing that we have recently that lets us do this kind of research is are very good computers. You need very, very good computers and you need a lot of computing power to process this kind of large, massive data set. And this also wasn't possible until relatively recently. And I think the third ingredient that was absolutely necessary is some of the software. So for instance, for the paper that we're going to talk about today, the program that we used did not exist until about a year or two before the paper came out. So basically even as I was analyzing the Data As a PhD student, I actually didn't even have the software tools to be able to do the final analysis that made it into the final paper. Basically to do this kind of causal research with natural field data, you need a massive, massive granular data set which wasn't possible until recently. You need very good computing power, which wasn't possible until very recently. And you know, very good software and programming that also didn't exist until very recently.
- [07:29]
And like serendipity, as you said that the software came available as you were in the midst of the work. Right. So that's pretty. Oh yeah, amazing.
- [07:39]
It was because if it didn't come out then we wouldn't have this paper that has been published. I think it's great that this paper came out because the work that we're doing is causal. There are real practical implications for managers and policymakers and other leaders who can use these managerial tools that come out of our research to influence other people, but also just individuals in general can try to think about how our research affects their own lives and try to leverage our findings to make their day to day lives a little bit more easier.
- [08:23]
Yeah, definitely with your research you had an opportunity to look at this very, very massive data set. And how did you choose what you were going to be looking at? You know, what, what, what did you decide to test with this amazing data set you had access to?
- [08:41]
Yeah, so basically one of my, you know, favorite topics to research is motivation. And in particular I'm interested in reducing quitting among workers. And the reason why is because I feel like many people spend years and years, tons of money and a lot of effort trying to get jobs that they've wanted for years. You know, so like nurses are in school for a very long time and they have to pay for tuition. A lot of teachers also have to do a lot of training before they become teachers and things like that. But the truth is about 55% of teachers tend to quit teaching within five years and about 60% of ER nurses and like it senior managers say that they're planning to quit pretty soon. And what this tells me is that, you know, there's something about the experience of work that is so aversive that people are throwing away this sunk cost that they've put in to get themselves to where they wanted to be for years and years. And they're actually, you know, having to do a career switch, which is very, very costly. And of course turnover is costly for organizations to too, because anytime someone quits, it costs the organization, I think like six to nine months of their salary to actually replace that worker. So of course, you know, when people are, if people are quitting their jobs because of an irrational reason, for instance, they're misperceiving their experience as especially bad or something like that, then it's really a lose, lose situation for both the organization and the worker because the worker is just losing years and years of training and experience and like their degrees. But of course, you know, for the organization, they have to find another new person and then train them again and then hope this person doesn't quit, you know, soon, I guess, like hope that they just stay forever. But of course that's, you know, not always true.
- [10:46]
Right. And as far as for the organization, you know, to know what it is, if there is something simple that you can adjust in the way that you are treating those employees or the way that you're presenting tasks, you know, that can really be helpful. If there was a simple sort of rule that people could follow, which, you know, good news, at least there's a hint toward a simple sort of rule. We'll go ahead and know that. So you're going to talk a little bit about the peak end rule and peak end effect, which we have an episode about that, that I've done on the Brading business. Talk about it all the time, but if you want to reintroduce it, that's great. And then talking about what you all found in your research to this new added version, I guess, of the peak end rule and peak end effect.
- [11:36]
So the peak end rule is very different from the way that people generally think about how people evaluate previous experiences. So generally if you ask someone like how do you think people evaluate past experiences? They'll say that people just take the average of a past experience. So if you've had a vacation that's like five days or something, then you'll just take an average of every moment and that's your overall experience of that vacation. But what the peak and rule says is no, no, there are actually certain moments within a past experience where people actually overweight those moments. And the peak End rule says that people overweight moments that are experiential peaks. So very extreme moments or the end, which is what happens most recently at the end. So I think, like, famously, there have been studies about colonoscopies where researchers try to ask people how they experience a colonoscopy, and they basically find that rather than an averaging rule where they just take the average of every single moment, people generally just kind of take the average of the peak and the end. And that's much more accurate, you know, much more accurate in the way that people actually remember past experiences with the colonoscopy.
- [13:04]
As you're saying that the studies that were done there, being able to show that for you don't want to end on the worst point.
- [13:12]
Melina Palmer
Right.
- [13:12]
Dr. Polly Kang
So when you ended, even people preferred to be in pain a little bit longer, to have that pain trickle out for them in a way. Yeah.
- [13:21]
So the way that they set up the study is they had two conditions, and one was a regular colonoscopy, and in the second condition, they had a regular colonoscopy. And then they added a little bit of time at the end of the colonoscopy where they just kept the scope at the edge for a few more minutes just to add a period of discomfort. So what that means is that they weren't actually experiencing pain at the end. But it is true that it lengthened the procedure and it lengthened it in a way that there was an added, you know, time period of discomfort. But people evaluated this second condition as much better than a normal colonoscopy, which was actually shorter and did not have an added, you know, amount of discomfort. So you're exactly right.
- [14:17]
Right. It's fascinating when we, we hear about that. Right. It seems silly, like why would we want to be in pain or discomfort or anything longer? But knowing if this works, even with that sort of experience, you know, that can tie into to so much. So we, we have the base now of what the peak end rule is. And now can you explain a little bit about your research and what you were looking at and what you found?
- [14:44]
Yeah, of course. So, I mean, of course people quit their jobs for, you know, many, many reasons. But my co authors and I have identified that a particular trigger of quitting that seems to be actually a mistake on the part of the workers is that people tend to overweight, of course, certain moments of their jobs. So I guess intuitively what people would think is that if you are assigned more hard tasks, then people should be more likely to quit than people who were assigned fewer Hard tasks. But what we find is that surprisingly, this isn't really the case. The order matters, actually, a lot more. So when people are assigned streaks of hard tasks, so multiple hard tasks in a row, then that's really what makes people quick. And when people experience a hard task most recently, then that moment is also overweighted. So it's streaks of hard tasks, and whether or not the recent task was hard, that disproportionately made people want to quit their jobs and actually quit their jobs. So, like, one important practical implication of our research is that simply reordering workers tasks to break up hard streaks, or honestly, even adding an easy task between hard streaks can actually be make the experience much, much, much better for the employee. And by making the experience better, people can. The organizations can actually reduce turnover by at least 22%, which is actually quite dramatic. And actually the effect is much, much stronger if the streaks are longer. So we looked at hard streaks of two to eight hard behaviors in a row. And these things, these streaks cause volunteers to become 22% to 110% more likely to quit. And we also find that streaks of easier behaviors, we also looked at 2 to 8 cause volunteers to become like 23% to 57% less likely to quit.
- [17:01]
It's fascinating. And like you said there, even it's not just that you have to replace hard things with easy things, but you can still do the same number of hard things, but you want to be breaking them up even if you're adding in an easy task or. I know I had suggested to you in our pre chat that like, you know, often a hard task is made up of a lot of littler tasks, you know, potentially. So, you know, maybe there's an opportunity to mentally break up that hard task so that it can be, you know, some easy piece that you segment out and think about it in a little bit of a different way. And that's something that both, you know, in the way that a manager would assign the task, or even if someone is looking to maybe optimize or gamify their own working experience on their own, they can think about their tasks a little bit differently and see that benefit.
- [17:57]
Yeah, I think that's exactly right. And I think, you know, one way that it applies to my life is, for instance, like, I could think about research or teaching or, you know, different components of the jobs in those kind of big ways. But of course, there's a lot of components to research. You know, some of it is just doing like a literature review, which is just reading Sometimes you have to do the data analysis, you know, sometimes you have to write the paper and things like that. And I think there are lots of different ways that you can segment pieces of a job to kind of break up the easy tasks and hard tasks or bad experience versus good experiences. And I think what I think is really special about the streak end rule is literally how it's one of the key motivational strategies in the current management literature. So, for instance, the most talked about motivational strategy includes financial incentives. So, you know, for instance, like bankers and traders, they get a huge bonus at the end of their year, which rewards them for their performance rate. But honestly, it's very widely used, but it's not very effective at influencing human behavior in most contexts. I actually think a lot of organizations can't really afford to do it or do it in a way that's very effective because it's hard to be very clear about expectations and actually stick to them. Right. And sometimes the evaluation is also less clear. So it's really hard to use financial incentives in like many organizational settings. And I think the second most popular motivation strategy includes nudges. And nudges have become really popular since the book Nudge came out. And nudges are of course, really great and very good complements to financial incentives because the costs are zero, unlike financial incentives. But the problem is that the impact is very small. And the impact is small because of it's actually by design. The impact is small by design because the point of nudges are to let people have some kind of freedom of choice and have decision power. So, for instance, like a very famous nudge is a default effect, right, where there's a tendency of people to just accept whatever has been said as the default. And organizations and policymakers can actually use defaults to try to influence people's behaviors. Like, for instance, an employer can set a default to have employees save a certain percentage of their income towards their 401k or something like that. But of course, people can still opt out of a default effect, which is what makes it a little bit less powerful, you know, I mean, it's definitely less powerful than like forcing people to do anything. The third motivation strategy in the literature, which is what I've been studying and researching for the past 10 years, is job design. And most of the research on job design generally looked at things like reframing their existing job. So you might call it something different, or you might do reflection exercises to help you cope with a job that's structurally bad and increases burnout. And actually, Adam Grant has talked about this before. So he basically said that most of the job design literature is about how to frame your structurally bad job, and a lot of it is about coping with a bad job. But for my co authors and I, we were like, well, okay, how can we actually increase motivation, reduce burnout, decrease exhaustion, reduce quitting in a way that's both a win win for employees and employers. And we thought it would be a real win win if the actual experience, experience of the job was better rather than having a bad job and then dealing with it later, you know, so then the approach that we decided to take was look at what can actually change the experience for the worker so that, you know, so that each job is actually structurally better. And I think what's really different about our strategy is that managers actually have to learn a managerial skill. You know, they have to learn about job design. They have to understand, you know, how they can schedule, you know, a worker's work task in a way that reduces turnover. So, and the first, and the very first step in doing that is actually for managers to think about their job as a manager as creating value instead of zero sum way where they might think they're competing with their employee. I think some managers, if they think about everything in a zero sum way, might think that the best thing for them to do is get their worker to work as many hours as possible or get as many tasks done as possible or something like that. But I think this is not, this is often not the right strategy because this can cause the workers to feel exploited a lot. So some employees who feel like they're being exploited by their employer start to take measures to feel like they're being exploited less, which might mean they take longer coffee breaks or, you know, if they're working from home. I know some of my friends have told me there's like a contraption you can buy that shakes your mouse for you so it looks like you're online all day, you know. So I think like, when there's some kind of mistrust and like a zero sum, like thinking from the manager's perspective, then it could turn into this like, toxic relationship where, I don't know where employers feel like employees are doing time theft, but then the employees feel like their employers are doing wage theft. Right. But actually, I think the first step for a good manager to think about management is that it's not zero sum and that if they manage their employees in an effective way, they can actually create a lot of value for both sides. So for instance, if you as a manager think about job design more consciously, like for instance, by breaking up hard tasks, then what they can do is honestly even assign more work so they could slot in like easy tasks in between the hard tasks to try to make the overall experience better. And it's really a win win because the workers literally have a better experience experience of what their job is. But then the managers can also get them to do a little bit more work. And this, of course, is good for the organization because employees are working more, they're happier, and they're going to quit, you know, they're less likely to quit.
- [25:50]
Yeah, definitely. I love that you went to the role of the manager and being able to think about how they can design and optimize for their team members. One of the traps I would be worried that a manager might get caught into is assuming that what's easy for them is what's easy for everyone. Right. And so, like, one task that I find really easy, one of my employees might actually think is a hard task. And so it can be difficult to properly assign across a group. But I think this is powerful as well because it doesn't necessarily have to be, you know, that the manager has to micromanage all their team members because they won't like that either. Right. But. But helping people to see and think about their tasks in a different way. Right. To ask a question, to say, does this feel easy to me or do I kind of dread doing that type of work and how am I going to approach it and helping to kind of coach them through it. There's at least a framework to go around about what do we think is something that's hard or easy for you as a team member and how can we help kind of structure your tasks so that you're going to be finding the work more enjoyable overall.
- [27:11]
Yeah, I definitely agree with that. I think that if managers don't know about this, then they probably don't even feel the need to think about what jobs are more enjoyable or easy or aversive and hard. But I think if they at least know that there is something like this happening, then they could be a little bit more conscientious about it overall. And I completely agree with you that people have different preferences for what they might like or dislike or think is hard. But I think sometimes it is, Sometimes there is an objective truth. So, for instance, I think, like, if you go to an ER or something like that, that I think certain types of patients are much more high stress than others. So for instance, if someone has A gunshot wound, a critical gunshot wound and they're bleeding out or something. Then I think that's much more stressful than someone, a patient who might just come in because they have the flu, you know, or have a fever or something like that. Of course, like that's, that's also difficult. But I think when it's a critical life or death situation, then it's objectively more stressful in that situation for sure.
- [28:31]
And so in that case, potentially then you don't know what's going to come in when. So it may feel like we don't have much of an option, but maybe it's filtering who gets assigned to what or even to say, if you've dealt with this difficult situation, then you maybe build into a process or something, you know, some easy type of tasks before you take on the next patient. Would that maybe be.
- [28:59]
Yeah, so I think generally in hospitals what people can think about is the triage process. So when someone comes in, they triage the patient to see like how critical their needs are and things like that. And I think from the charge nurses perspective, like they can kind of see, you know, which nurse most recently did something incredibly stressful versus not. And of course, like in critical situations where time is of the essence, then I think it's really hard to assign difficult tasks. But I think in, you know, less urgent cases, like a normal hospital situation where like you have floater nurses who work at different types of stations. So a floater nurse might have a shift in like the baby ward or something where they, you know, hug babies for being hours. But then like they might also have a shift in the ER where it is tough like that. But I think if the charge nurse knows someone was in the ER like three days in a row, then like, maybe then they should be like, oh, I really need to give this person an easier shift today so that they can get more rejuvenated and have a better overall experience and hopefully not burn out.
- [30:29]
Right. Break up that, that streak. Right. And so when we think about something in the more, you know, office work type of a role, which can be in a physical office or working remotely, as we're thinking about the types of tasks and what makes up a task, right. So how big or how small, like we're saying, so if we say you're assigned to this project and this project is going to be taking up the bulk of your time for the next six months, right. To say that feel that's too big, right. To say, like you're doing this really hard thing for Six months, I think we could say that's probably too long without trying to break up with little stuff. But how, how could a manager, you know, start to help? Is it that it needs to be, you know, multiple things throughout a specific day? Or like you said with the nurses, is it like one hard day and then an easier day? You know, how. How might we start to think about optimizing and not creating too many hard streaks?
- [31:30]
I think it kind of depends on the nature of the job and kind of the larger time frame. So, for instance, like when people first join a consulting job or like a finance job, I think generally what happens is they're assigned an overall project first, right? So if you first start a consulting job, you might get your first project in an operations role or something like that, and then after that's done, then you get assigned a new role and things like that and experience. And just like you said, some of these projects run for months, some of these projects run for weeks. I think there is a macro, zoomed out way to think about it where you can kind of think about each project as a big task. But I think it's relative to how long people kind of expect to stay in a job. So, for instance, I think for jobs like consulting, most people feel like they're going to stay at least two years. You know, they're going to wait it out at least two years to see how their experience was before they evaluate if they're going to try to stay in consulting or not or something like that. And I think, like, finance is kind of the same way, like some people say in banking for like a couple years before they decide they want to do banking forever or, like, go into, I don't know, private equity or like, they want to leave finance overall or something like that. So I think that kind of the time horizon people think about when they enter a job kind of helps to figure out how to think about, you know, like streaks. So, for instance, I think for nurses, I think generally when people want to become a nurse, they want to be a nurse for years and years and, like, live out their career as a successful nurse, I think. But of course, in that kind of case, I think people are constantly evaluating their experience more, more granularly because it's their entire life in their minds. So I think for something like nursing, you might want to look at it on, like a case by case or a daily basis. But I think for something like consulting, where, like, generally people say about two years maybe on average, if they do a certain amount of projects Then the person assigning a project could be mindful of, you know, did this person get a streak of projects they're not interested in or was especially difficult or understaffed? And then I think even more granularly, the managers within the teams can think about it more day to day as well. Like, did this person stay up till like 3am four days in a row? You know, So I think, I think there are big ways and small ways to think about streaks. And I think it also helps for the employee too to try to understand this effect and see how they also personally want to think about streaks. So for instance, maybe, maybe right now it's bad because I stayed up till like 1am working the last three days, but then I can tell myself that's true. But I had a few really great months where I got to, you know, travel to cool places for my job and then do parts of the job that I love, you know?
- [35:03]
Right.
- [35:03]
Melina Palmer
Yeah.
- [35:04]
Dr. Polly Kang
So good opportunities for reflection and taking the time to maybe, you know, focus on those good moments and find those breaks. Part of what I've been thinking about quite a bit is we've been talking some additional research from, you know, an amazing person at Wharton, being looking at the just temptation bundling and Katie Milkman's work. Right. And so feels like as a. Whether you're, you know, solo worker and you're looking at your own stuff or if you're thinking about your team, you know, being able to break up a streak with something totally unrelated. But the, that value that comes in, like once I do this thing, I get this little treat at the end and you can kind of work in your own, you know, bits of value and temptation bundling. Have you looked at all about maybe crossover between streak end and temptation bundling? Or did that just kind of like come out of my own brain?
- [35:57]
No, I really love that. But I think, I think, I think temptation bundling, I, I love temptation bundling. I, I tried it myself, you know, because I, I don't really like running or anything, but then I'll allow myself to do something I love, you know, like watch a horrible reality show or something while I'm running to like make it more tolerable. But I think the process is a bit different. So temptation bundling, you're doing two things simultaneously, but for what we're doing it really, the back to back order is what really matters. So for instance, like, if, if I'm cleaning a very horribly large data set or something, like, I might still have like music on that I love and I think like that's more like temptation bundling and then for the streak end rule or leveraging the streak and rule would involve more like what do I do after? So. So I think like procedurally it's like a little bit of a different strategy.
- [37:01]
Yeah.
- [37:01]
But maybe you can do both and it'll be even better.
- [37:04]
Right? Yeah. It's just interesting ways that we can think about kind of optimizing our own work experience, whatever that might mean for us.
- [37:16]
Melina Palmer
Right.
- [37:16]
Dr. Polly Kang
And I think being able to look for the opportunities to, you know, just adjust your schedule or to like we said, rearrange tasks or whatever that happens to be so that it's going to be just a little bit better for everyone that's involved. I know the other thing that I was thinking about with this, when it comes to assigning tasks, when we're thinking, you know, maybe for ourselves, maybe for team members, I think strategies that tend to come into mind if people think about it at all, which typically it's just like I'm just gonna do whatever's on the list in this moment.
- [37:50]
Melina Palmer
Right.
- [37:50]
Dr. Polly Kang
But if they do think about it, we either say we're gonna do the low hanging fruit, get rid of all the easy stuff first and then there's space for the hard stuff, or say I'm going to do the eat the frog. Right. And do the all the hard stuff first. So then I have space for the fun and easy stuff at the end.
- [38:07]
Yeah.
- [38:08]
And so I think it's important just to show like what your research has found is really that neither of those is. Is typically a good ongoing strategy. Right. But we more want to like interweave and try to kind of be like hard, easy, hard, easy. Right.
- [38:27]
Yeah, I know it really was not intuitive to me because I'm the kind of eat the frog first person. So like I remember when I was in college, I'd wake up at like 4am to do the stuff I hated and then try to have a good rest of the day. But I guess now I realize that that was not a good strategy.
- [38:48]
It's funny, I wonder. I was thinking about that like you were saying for the nurses going through school, school and where. Oh yeah, there would have been so much hard stuff that they went through in, in college. And I wonder how much of, you know, you're enduring and whether it's like you're trying to get that promotion or you're thinking about that future that you're working toward. It's like you're willing to do the grind because of what's kind of out on the horizon. And then once you get the job and it doesn't live up to that, you know, shiny happy expectation of where you felt like it was, you know, unicorns and rainbows once you finally get the job, that maybe that's like you, you set really like unrealistic anchor for the job. And that's maybe something for employers to be aware of too. Right. Because this was like the thing that kept them going. And then you realize, oh, this sucks too, or, or more. Right. And so if you can maybe then help, especially probably in those early days to kind of ease in and. Yeah. Help them to not have so many hard streaks, especially early on, can be really valuable.
- [40:01]
Yeah, I definitely agree with that. And I think it's so funny you say that because I was just joking with someone. I was like, I wonder how many people would have actually gone to med school if the weed out classes weren't all in the beginning.
- [40:18]
Right.
- [40:18]
You know what I mean? Because I, I remember when I was in college, for most majors, the weed out classes were the first like two or so introductory classes, you know, And I just wonder like, how many of those people would have been wonderful doctors who, who like, love their jobs if only the first two classes didn't involve, you know, giving everyone Ds or SP.
- [40:46]
Right. And we would have had a little bit of easing in and we feel too, there's that like sunk cost. I've made it far enough. I, you know, like, I'm going to keep on, you know, moving forward on that momentum and whatnot. Yeah, that's interesting and good to, good to think through, I think, for people.
- [41:06]
But what I really like about this strategy is that anyone can use it. So for instance, for financial incentives, you know, not everyone can use it. Like, I can't give myself a random monetary bonus for like doing, you know, going to the gym like three days in a row or something that's meaningless and or other nudges to like, I cannot easily create a default way for me to do something I hate. But I think for the streak end rule, you know, I can actually take some control and do something to design my day or week in a way that makes it tolerable. Even if maybe I'm looking forward to a very tough work week, you know, but I can say like, hey, like, I know this next week is going to be tough, but maybe I can, I can make sure that I add some easier things or enjoyable things in between, you know, tasks that I hate so that I can make my overall week, much more tolerable. So I, you know, I can do it myself. I can also do it for my like research assistants. Right. Like if I know that they have to code like hours and hours of data, then I can say, okay, well maybe on Monday you have to do this grueling thing, but then on Tuesday I want you to watch to look for some good YouTube videos I might be able to use for my next study or something that's more fun. So I think anyone can use this. And actually I have a lot of follow up projects where we're going to try to see how this really plays out in real organizations, but also run some traditional experimental studies to see how big does a task have to be, how long does this effect persist and in what contexts can we see this really working very well and things like that. I'm excited to do more to understand this effect much more strongly. But I think just like people knowing that this is happening alone is quite powerful because then people can actually think about their tasks in a more meaningful way and kind of schedule things in a way that might work much better for them.
- [43:43]
Absolutely.
- [43:44]
And it's costless.
- [43:45]
Yeah, right? Yeah. That feels like there's just lots of upside. Right. And lots of potential in, in working on this. So out of curiosity, because there are people from all sorts of organizations and all sorts of roles around the world that listen to the show. So is there a particular type of research partner, company or organization that would be kind of like ideal that if someone is listening and thinking, oh my goodness, I would love to be a part of research like that and share our data like anybody that you're thinking of, any types of industry or areas that might make sense to do some of that follow up research that they should reach out.
- [44:22]
We would love to work with honestly any organization because right now we've, we've looked at the context of a nonprofit organization only. So we know first of all that it probably works a lot in these types of contexts that involve pro social behavior. But there are lots of different types of pro social behavior too. And like, I would also like to know what happens in a for profit organization as well. And if some people have this kind of, you know, very good data, you know, like earlier when we talked about if they have a granular data set or I don't know, like a year's worth of data or something like that, where they track their employees, then we can, we can do the same type of research that we've done to see what the effects size is for their particular Organization. And we can also depending on like what kind of data they have, we can also look at different dependent variables. So like different behaviors, not just quitting behaviors, rights. Because there's like many ways to look at motivation and productivity. So anyone can reach out, help them make sure that their employees can have more productive and happier lies.
- [45:41]
Awesome. Well, we love it. And I know with this type of thing in, in real organizations they tend to have most tracking from, you know, call centers or people that are working in chats, like similar kind of area that you have. But I love that. So for anyone who is interested, you know, reach out, let us know and you can reach out to me. I'll get you in touch with Polly and of course for those who want to, you know, follow you, learn more about what you're doing, get in touch, you know, what's their best path to do. So.
- [46:10]
Oh, they can just email me. I'm always on email. I have a website, it's just my name, polyking.com. you can find all my information there. Pretty responsive.
- [46:22]
Perfect. Well, we will have that in the show notes to make it easy for everyone as well. So thank you again, Polly for joining me on the show and talking about the streak end effect and the amazing work that you've been doing. I look forward to hearing about who you end up working with after this conversation. Right. Who reaches out and, you know, what's next. So, yeah, thanks again.
- [46:44]
Great. Thank you so much.
- [46:47]
Melina Palmer
Thank you again to Dr. Paulie Kang for joining me on the show today. What got your brain buzzing in today's conversation? For me, I fell in love with the streak end rule the moment I.
- [46:58]
Dr. Polly Kang
First heard about it.
- [46:59]
Melina Palmer
Shout out to Dave Nussbaum, by the way. He made introductions to a whole bunch of amazing people who have been on the podcast recently, including Polly and Sunita Sa and Adam Galinsky. Those three have just been in the last three weeks. Dave, you're awesome. So why do I like this so much? For one, I love the peak end rule. So I love that it has a cousin in thinking about work experience specifically. That's pretty cool. I also love that it's kind of counterintuitive, but when you hear it, you can also understand pretty easily why it works. And I also love that it allows you to get more done and feel happier about it. That's a real win win for you and your company, which is also awesome. The key, of course, as we discussed in the episode, is an understanding what classifies as a hard task and what's an easy task and knowing that it isn't the same for you as it will be for members of your team. So in my opinion, this is a great opportunity to leverage the Ikea effect as well. So you can loop in your team members to help identify what's easy and what's hard to structure their day in a way that will help them to feel better at the end and get more of the right stuff done at the right times. Take a moment now to think about a day where you were really in the zone. You got a ton of stuff done and felt awesome and empowered at the end of the day. What tasks were you working on? Was there anything different about those days compared to those that felt like a total drag and drain on your resources? That might be a good place to start as you begin looking at your own hard and easy tasks to optimize your days moving forward with the Streak End Rule tool. Whatever you decide to try, come share it with us on social media.
- [48:47]
Dr. Polly Kang
We would love to hear about it.
- [48:49]
Melina Palmer
You'll find me as the Brainy Biz pretty much everywhere and as Melina Palmer on LinkedIn. And I have, of course, links to make it easy to connect with me and Polly in the show notes along with links to my top related past episodes and books. It's all waiting for you in the app you're listening to and@the brainybusiness.com 467. And thank you again to Dr. Polly Kang for joining me on the show today. It was a delight to chat with and learn from you. Join me Tuesday for another Brainy episode of the Brainy Business Podcast. It's going to be a lot of fun. You don't want to miss it. Until then. Thanks again for listening and learning with me and remember to be thoughtful.
- [49:36]
Thank you for listening to the Brainy Business Podcast. Molina offers virtual strategy sessions, workshops and other services to help businesses be more brain friendly. For more free resources, visit thebrainybusiness. Com.