The mystery of idle smart bracelets and watches: purely recording data does not bring fun

Nowadays, people are increasingly interested in conducting quantitative research on their bodies.

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This isn’t just a trend driven by the Apple Watch, although it does help you track your activity data; nor is it driven by fancy pedometers like Fitbit and Jawbon or questionable sleep quality measurement apps. People are keen to quantify their bodies and behaviors, a product of an era where data is paramount. Whether it’s the various news reports on this or the biometric scanning programs for employees that have been adopted by large companies at a cost of up to $4,000 per person, they have all played a role in fueling this trend.

It's unclear which of these measurements of human activity will stick around over time, and which ones will stick around day after day. But as the trend of measuring our own behavior gains momentum, new evidence suggests that we don't enjoy it when we do it. A new study in the Journal of Consumer Research shows that measuring our own behavior reduces people's interest in continuing to do any type of activity.

In a series of experiments, Jordan Etkin, a professor of marketing at Duke University, found that people’s intrinsic motivations are affected by measuring behavior. Whether you’re coloring, recording your reading, or counting your steps, as soon as you start quantifying your behavior, you’ll gradually lose interest.

In the first experiment, researchers asked 105 undergraduates to color different shapes in a few minutes and then measured how much fun they experienced. During the coloring process, the researchers constantly reminded them how much progress they had completed the task - "You have finished a shape." The results showed that among these participants, the more colors they completed, the less fun they experienced.

In another controlled experiment, the researchers distributed pedometers to 100 participants and asked them to wear them throughout the day. Similar to the color experiment, those who wore pedometers walked more than those who did not, but found it more difficult to feel happy while walking, even if they did not check the number of steps on the pedometer. In the last controlled experiment, the experimenters asked 300 students to read. Those who could see the progress of the pages read more in the specified time than the control group who could not see the page number, but found it difficult to experience the beauty of reading.

“There’s a very mainstream study in psychology that looks at how people’s intrinsic motivation and inherent enjoyment of doing something is undermined by providing them with external incentives,” Etkin gave me a classic example. “If you have kids, you know that kids love colors, they love to paint, and if you reward them for coloring, they get less enjoyment from that behavior, and they’re less likely to paint in the future.”

However, Etkin also reminded of another exception. If a person does something for a special purpose, then recording the data will stimulate their interest in persisting.

“It’s important to understand why you’re doing something. If you’re doing something for a specific purpose, like if I’m walking to lose weight or to get healthier, then walking has a specific goal for me, and then recording and measuring it won’t be boring. In fact, it’s precisely because you want to achieve a specific goal that quantifying your walk will make you more interested.”

Etkin concludes: “If you’re doing something purely for fun, then keeping detailed quantitative records of that activity can have a negative impact. The act of measuring can reduce the enjoyment you get from that activity.”

A few more words should be said here. Like many psychological studies, the subjects of Etkin's experiment were mostly European and American students, highly educated, from industrialized, wealthy and democratic places. Because the population targeted by this study is very special, it is difficult to say whether the conclusions drawn can be widely applicable.

But let's be honest, people who buy Fitbit wristbands to monitor their weight loss are not counting steps for fun, and they don't care what the research says. But for designers who make wearable products and expect people to record all kinds of new activity data, Etkin's findings may serve as a wake-up call.