A streak has nothing to lose
You know how it goes. You start on a Monday. The first week is easy, the second is fine, and then it is half past ten on a Thursday night, you are on a train, and the day runs out. The counter goes back to zero. The strange part is how little you feel about it. A number changed on a screen. Nothing else happened.
That is the trouble with streaks, badges and rings. They cost nothing to break. The app made your promise for you and had no way of holding you to it, so when the sofa argues with the streak, the sofa wins. It was never much of an argument.
Reminders have the same problem in a louder voice. The first one moves you. The tenth one is furniture. You learn to swipe it away before you have read it, and by then the app has spent everything it had.
Losses hurt more than gains
In 1979, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky published prospect theory in Econometrica. The part that matters here is plain enough: we do not treat a gain and a loss of the same size the same way. “Losses loom larger than gains,” as Kahneman and Tversky put it. Giving up something you already hold stings more than picking up the same thing pleases.
That gap is the lever. Offer someone a reward for walking and you are offering a gain, which is easy to wave away on a wet Tuesday, because nothing you already have is at stake. Ask them to put their own money down first and the sums flip. Now the skipped day takes something away from you.
Economists call this a commitment device. Today, while you still mean it, you set a price on tomorrow’s excuse. A small category of apps now runs on this idea, and they differ mainly in what they charge for and when.
Someone ran the experiment on step goals
You do not have to take it on faith that a theory about risk carries over to walking, because one team tested exactly that.
In 2016, Mitesh Patel and colleagues published a randomised trial in the Annals of Internal Medicine (volume 164, issue 6, pages 385 to 394). The team gave adults a goal of 7,000 steps a day for 13 weeks and split them into four groups. One got daily feedback on their step count and nothing more. One earned money for each day they hit the goal. One entered a daily lottery. For the last group, the researchers put the money in an account at the start of each month and took a small amount out for every missed day.
Each group could earn the same money. Only the framing changed. The group that stood to lose money hit their goal on about 45 per cent of days, against about 30 per cent for feedback alone, and it was the only group that beat plain feedback by a margin the trial could call real. Paying people for good days did not do it. The lottery did not do it. Taking money away did.
The same shape outside walking
Gyms tell a similar story. Heather Royer, Mark Stehr and Justin Sydnor (American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, 2015) paid workers at a large company to visit the gym for a month, then offered some of them a commitment contract: their own money, held against their own future attendance. The paid month lifted attendance while it lasted, as you would expect. The interesting part came later. The people who took the contract were still turning up more often long after the payments had stopped.
Money you might win moves you for as long as it is on offer. Money you might lose seems to hold on longer.
What none of this proves
Two honest notes, because the studies are more careful than the marketing usually is.
First, in the step-goal trial the effect faded. Once the money stopped, the loss-framed group drifted back toward everyone else over the following weeks. A stake is a way through the first hard months. It is not a spell, and nobody has shown that it rewires you for good.
Second, and this matters more: these studies tested a mechanism, not our app. They say something about how people in a trial responded to money on the line. They say nothing about what anyone using Strutty achieves, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. Distrust any company that quotes a trial as if it were their own results, this one included.
What to do with it
If reminders work for you, keep them. Money is a blunt tool and there is no sense reaching for one you don’t need.
But if there is a habit you have restarted five times, the reminder was never what was missing. You already know what to do and you already want to do it. What you lack is a reason to do it today rather than tomorrow, and that is the hole a stake fills.
Three things to get right if you try it:
- Set the goal for your worst day, not your best one. A goal you miss teaches nothing.
- Set the stake high enough to notice on a Tuesday evening and low enough to shrug off if a bad week happens anyway.
- Read what happens when you fall ill or your phone dies, before you hand over a card. Warnings, grace, appeals, and who decides.
Where we come in
Strutty is this mechanism built as an app, and nothing more. You set a daily step goal and a daily stake. Apple Health counts the steps on its own, with no photos and no logging. Hit the goal and you pay nothing, that day and every day you walk. Skip it, and after two warnings and a morning of grace, Strutty charges that day’s stake. There is no subscription, no pot and no prize, so there is no way to come out ahead. The best case is that you keep all of your money and get the walk. Here is how it works, in full, if you want the rules before the sales pitch.
We can’t tell you whether it will work for you. We can tell you why it is built this way: the streak never had anything to lose, and you do.
References
- Kahneman, D., and Tversky, A. (1979). Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision under Risk. Econometrica, 47(2), 263 to 291. doi:10.2307/1914185
- Patel, M. S., Asch, D. A., Rosin, R., and colleagues (2016). Framing Financial Incentives to Increase Physical Activity Among Overweight and Obese Adults: A Randomized Clinical Trial. Annals of Internal Medicine, 164(6), 385 to 394. doi:10.7326/M15-1635
- Royer, H., Stehr, M., and Sydnor, J. (2015). Incentives, Commitments, and Habit Formation in Exercise: Evidence from a Field Experiment with Workers at a Fortune-500 Company. American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, 7(3), 51 to 84. doi:10.1257/app.20130327
