With the new year approaching, millions of people will turn to apps to help them get fit, save money or learn something new. Yet digital tools designed to help individuals achieve goals can sometimes backfire and actually demotivate an individual. Consider a fitness app that allows users to compare their performance to others. Instead of feeling inspired, users may feel inadequate and lose motivation.

Technology can help with motivation, for example, by making progress-tracking more adaptive or highlighting short-term goal attainment and early indicators of success, even if long-term goals are still in the distance. Artificial intelligence-generated feedback can also be made more personalized – emphasizing progress toward a long-term goal rather than raw data, such as steps taken or dollars saved. Yet on their own, goal-related technologies do not fully guarantee success.

One problem, according to marketing professor Kaitlin Woolley ’12, is the gap between studies of motivation and of technology. A new paper she has co-authored proposes a way to bring these disciplines together.

“These areas have been operating in silos,” said Woolley, professor of marketing at the Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management, in the Cornell SC Johnson College of Business. “And so part of our motivation in writing this piece was really to think about the connections between what we know about human motivation and how modern technologies actually shape behavior.”

Woolley is lead author of “Digital Tracking, Gamification, Social Media, and AI: How Technology Influences Motivation,” which published online Nov. 27 in Consumer Psychology Review. Her co-author is Marissa Sharif, associate professor of marketing at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

Drawing from a multitude of studies in artificial intelligence, technology, motivation and social media, Woolley and Sharif organized four core functionalities of technology – data capture, gamification, social media and AI-powered dynamic feedback – and the benefits and drawbacks of each into what they term the GAINS and DRAINs framework.

• GAINs is Goal clarity and attainability; Action-Intention; Intrinsic enjoyment; New information; and Support.
• DRAINs is Distraction; Reward misalignment; Action avoidance; Information overload; and Negative self-efficacy.

The idea, Woolley said, is to not let the dynamic aspects of technology – such as gamification, tracking and AI-powered feedback – get in the way of a user’s intrinsic motivation, whether it be to get in shape, save money or learn a new language.

“How can you take the pieces of those technologies that are going to be motivating and also watch out for some of the pitfalls?” she said. “That’s the essence of GAINs and DRAINs – the fact that any given technology is going to have multiple different impacts on motivation. Our aim was to highlight the benefits and drawbacks, and try to identify ways to mitigate some of those drawbacks.”

Woolley and Sharif’s model bridges classic motivational principles such as goal-setting and reinforcement theory with emerging research on technology in areas such as data capture, to help predict when and why technologies either motivate or demotivate users.

Their research offers ideas for leveraging the GAINs framework, and ways designers can prevent the drawbacks associated with DRAINs.

“Overall,” they wrote, “applying the GAINS model suggests that the next generation of motivational technologies should not just measure what users do, but engineer experiences that make sustained motivation more likely, personalized and emotionally rewarding.”

One of the ways to mitigate the negatives associated with DRAINs, they wrote, is to shift the focus of incentives away from raw surface metrics and toward achievements that highlight mastery of a task, or meaningful progress toward an end goal.

“We think about a beginner versus an expert, and tailoring feedback and information depending on the stage of goal pursuit,” Woolley said. “You can personalize based on proficiency, or on how long people have been active, and give them feedback that would match their current level.”

Another suggestion is to offer less feedback but make it more actionable. “We suggest that marketers and designers adopt a ‘motivational design audit’ based on the DRAINs categories,” they wrote, “to identify where technologies over-stimulate, mis-reward or discourage users and guide redesigns that promote motivation.”

Woolley said gamification is a prime culprit in demotivation, as users can become so focused on the game aspect of the app that they lose sight of the original goal.

“You see this sometimes with Duolingo (a language-learning app) where people are sort of addicted to the game,” she said. “There are features of the game that can motivate a user, but they also can actually undermine learning because people begin to focus less on the content and more on the game.”

The researchers see future research in this realm addressing fundamental changes in motivation spurred by technology; inequality in terms of access to tech; and other contextual moderators of motivation, including age.