Wadhwa Monica, Kim JeeHye Christine
Department of Marketing, INSEAD
Department of Marketing, INSEAD.
Psychol Sci. 2015 Jun;26(6):701-8. doi: 10.1177/0956797614568681. Epub 2015 May 4.
Common intuition and research suggest that winning is more motivating than losing. However, we propose that just failing to obtain a reward (i.e., nearly winning it) in one task leads to broader, positive motivational effects on subsequent unrelated tasks relative to clearly losing or actually obtaining the reward. We manipulated a near-win experience using a game app in Experiments 1 through 3 and a lottery in Experiment 4. Our findings showed that nearly winning in one task subsequently led participants to walk faster to get to a chocolate bar (Experiment 1), salivate more for money (Experiment 2), and increase their effort to earn money in a card-sorting task (Experiment 3). A field study (Experiment 4) demonstrated that nearly winning led people to subsequently spend more money on desirable consumer products. Finally, our findings showed that when the activated motivational state was dampened in an intervening task, the nearly-winning effect was attenuated.
通常的直觉和研究表明，胜利比失败更具激励性。然而，我们提出，在一项任务中仅仅未能获得奖励（即几乎赢得奖励）相对于明确失败或实际获得奖励，会对后续不相关任务产生更广泛的积极激励作用。在实验1至3中，我们使用一款游戏应用来操纵接近胜利的体验，在实验4中则使用了抽奖。我们的研究结果表明，在一项任务中接近胜利随后会使参与者更快地走去拿巧克力棒（实验1），看到钱时分泌更多唾液（实验2），并在卡片分类任务中增加赚钱的努力（实验3）。一项实地研究（实验4）表明，接近胜利会使人们随后在心仪的消费品上花费更多。最后，我们的研究结果表明，当在中间任务中激活的激励状态被削弱时，接近胜利的效应就会减弱。
