How the Chance of Success Affects the Effort People Put In

Source: iStock image licensed to Art Markman

Many of the things you do in life can be improved with additional effort. In school, spending more time on a report is likely to lead to a better grade. At work, you might enlist the help of a team member to look over a presentation to increase the chance that you’ll succeed in landing a client. Doing another workout might make you more likely to win an athletic competition.

What factors lead you to put in this extra effort (or to engage additional resources) to improve your chances of success? A paper in the May, 2020 issue of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General by Joshua Lewis and Joseph Simmons suggests that you are more likely to put in additional effort or to spend more resources when you are likely to feel good about a decision. They call this idea prospective outcome bias.

One prediction of prospective outcome bias is that people should be more likely to work to improve the chances of success when the chances of succeeding are already high rather than when the chances are low. The idea is that when you put in extra effort, you want to feel like that effort was worth it, so you are more likely to do it if you think you’re going to succeed. Increasing the chance of success of something that is unlikely will probably not lead to a good feeling in the end, even though you’re still increasing the chances of success. The authors demonstrated this effect in nine different studies.

In one study, participants were told that they could increase the chance of winning a prize by typing keys on the keyboard a certain number of times. For example, in one choice, participants were asked if they would be willing to increase the chance of winning a $5 Amazon gift card by 12 percent by typing “ab” repeatedly, 110 times. Participants answered several such questions, but one was selected at random, and participants had to follow through on their answer. Then, they would actually have the opportunity to win the prize. Participants who could increase the chance of winning from 85 percent to 97 percent were much more likely to say yes than were participants who could increase the chance of winning from 3 percent to 15 percent.

Another study in this series looked systematically at the probabilities of success and found that as the chance of success went up, the additional effort people were likely to put in also went up. A third study looked at judgments about what people would do in complex situations, like business scenarios, and obtained a similar result that people were likely to invest more resources to increase the chances of a likely outcome than to increase the chances of an unlikely outcome.

A final study looked at the amount of effort people would put in to improve the chances of success for smaller and larger outcomes. In this study, participants could type the letters “ab” repeatedly to increase the chances of winning a cash prize. In some cases, they could get a large increase in the chance of winning a small prize (say, increasing the chance of winning $0.40 by 25 percent). In other cases, they could get a small increase in the chance to win a large prize (say, increasing the chance of winning $2.00 by 5 percent). As before, the baseline chance of winning the prize was either low or high. The options were set up so that the expected economic payout from this extra effort was the same in each case. That means there is no economic advantage to putting in more effort in one case than in another.

In this study, participants were still willing to put in more effort to increase the chance of winning when the overall probability of winning was high than when it was low. In addition, they put in more effort overall to win larger prizes rather than smaller ones. This combination of results reflects that people will feel better if they win than if they don’t (so they put in more effort when the chances of winning are already high) and they will feel better winning a large prize than a small prize (so they put in more effort to win a big prize than a small one).

These findings reflect that we often focus on the outcomes of our efforts rather than on the process for achieving a goal. That makes sense in some ways. A lot of the reason we put in effort in the first place is to achieve our goals.

But the process by which we achieve our goals often matters more for our long-term success. Training for an athletic event requires a lot of effort, even though you may fail often along the way. Learning a difficult concept in school involves a lot of effort early-on that may not be rewarded by recognition of your expertise. If you only put in effort in situations in which you are already close to succeeding, you may not try many new things that could ultimately expand your range of expertise.

So, when you’re trying to decide what to work on next, you should ask yourself whether you need to spend more time on skills that need a lot of improvement and prospects that are unlikely just to open up more possibilities in the future.