The bonus was chocolate. Three Hershey’s Kisses or five.
A hundred and twenty-four students at a large American university took part in a lab study for course credit. They could choose one of two assignments. Both meant writing five short reviews of product categories, such as smartphones, one minute per review. Task A paid 6 points per review. Task B paid 10. Every 10 points earned one Kiss.
The researchers, Meng Zhu, Yang Yang and Christopher Hsee, closed off the obvious excuses. The students were told up front that they could do only one task, and only once. The payoffs and deadlines were set by randomizers, so nobody could read a hidden message into which task got which. Both tasks took exactly five minutes, and the prize came right after.
In the control group, both tasks stayed open for 24 hours. Most students took the five Kisses. A few, 13.3 percent, took the three anyway.
In the urgency group, Task A, the three-Kiss task, would expire in 10 minutes. Task B would expire in 24 hours. Five minutes of work fit easily inside either window. And 31.3 percent chose Task A.
The students, the authors wrote, were “willing to give up a high-value prize that was 1.67 times the value of the low-value prize, merely because the low-payoff assignment was characterized by an illusion of expiration.”
The team ran four more experiments with online workers, paid in cents or in chances to win gift cards. In one, workers made the same kind of choice three rounds in a row: a lottery entry for a $25 gift card on a task that stayed open 50 minutes, or for a $20 card on a task that closed in 5. By the end of the third round, 58.8 percent of workers in the urgency condition had chosen the smaller prize at least once, against 38.4 percent in the control condition. The same experiment found the effect stronger among people who saw themselves as busy.
The paper came out in the Journal of Consumer Research in 2018, under the name “The Mere Urgency Effect.”“People showing this effect are choosing objectively worse options over objectively better options,” Zhu told her university’s news office.
Back in the first lab, each student finished the five reviews and was handed the prize they had picked. Nearly a third of the urgency group walked out with three Kisses.