Factors That Influence on Efficacy

Factors that influence on efficacy

Many people who have desires to change behavior in life motivate themselves in many ways towards success. In specific, they rely on criteria like SMART to set achievable goals and make public commitment to make friends become referee. The idea of commitment contracts services like stickK become popular because it formalizes the process of obtaining goals to improve the possibility of success. We want to know how do such commitment contracts work for object pursuers?

According to theories of behavioral economics that explain how humans behave in the real world [*], humans tend to devalue the future, which means people tend to put a higher value on any immediate costs or benefits than on those which we’ll experience in the future [*]. Because of this psychological phenomenon, people prone to focus on obtaining immediate rewards at the cost of losing longer term benefits, in other words, we knock down the value of keeping exercise everyday while one chocolate bar is perceived to be over-valued, so that we cannot resist it. And also because of the value reduction about future, people tend to feel it easy to change behavior in the future, but when tomorrow becomes today, people will think that ‘I can do that tomorrow’ again.

What commitment contracts do is to make instant temptation too more expensive to gain. Putting stake into invaluable but desired behavior is an effect way to change its perceived value so that people are not willing to choose this short-term benefit with higher cost though.

Besides, there is another reason why taking stakes can improve success possibility of achieving objects, loss aversion, a psychological term means to ……

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In the future, stickK and its experts should study the factors that make influence on acceptability, numbers of participants, long-term effectiveness of commitment contracts, and so on, in order to really and truly help people modify the behavior harmful to their future among huge population.