Compelling Goals

Compelling Goals

Compelling goals is the first of the six ingredients in Adam Alter's model of behavioural addiction: a goal set just out of reach, so that clearing it does not end the game but reveals the next bar, set slightly higher. The addictive part is not the achievement but that achievement is structurally deferred. It is an author's framework built from cases rather than a tested effect, and the one real study in the chapter belongs to somebody else.

What it is

Alter sets out the six ingredients in Irresistible, published in 2017. In his own words they are compelling goals just beyond reach, irresistible and unpredictable positive feedback, a sense of incremental progress, tasks that become slowly more difficult, unresolved tensions, and strong social connections. This vault's labels for the other five are glosses rather than his wording, and one of them imports Nir Eyal's vocabulary into Alter's model.

The first ingredient describes a structure rather than a mechanism. A target that recedes as it is approached leaves a person permanently mid-attempt, which is a different psychological position from either chasing or having arrived.

In effect

Alter's opening case is Bob Beamon's long jump at the 1968 Olympics, a record-setting leap that left the athlete not satisfied but already asking what the next peak experience in his life would be. Michael Larson took the same non-terminating structure and gamed it, memorising the pattern on the Press Your Luck board and walking away with a six-figure sum, which is offered as proof that even a solved game does not end the chasing.

The chapter's one genuine study is the marathon finding. Finishing times bunch just below round numbers across roughly nine and a half million recorded runners, which shows the target shaping the behaviour more than the distance does. That work is Eric Allen, Patricia Dechow, Devin Pope and George Wu's, and it should be cited to them rather than to the book.

Fitness trackers formalise the structure. Oliver Burkeman's line, quoted in the chapter, is that a daily step count means you exist in a state of near-continuous failure. Katherine Schreiber and Leslie Sim's work on exercise addiction is quoted for the same mechanism, that focusing on numbers divorces a person from being in tune with their body.

What it does not say

It does not rest on research. This is a framework assembled from cases and borrowed findings, and nothing in the chapter tests it.

It does not own the marathon finding. That belongs to Allen, Dechow, Pope and Wu, and citing the book for it drops the authors who did the work.

It does not say that goal-setting is harmful. The claim is narrower: that a goal structured so it can never be completed produces a particular kind of persistence, which is useful to designers and costly to users.

Sources

  1. Alter, A. (2017). Irresistible. Ingredient one of six, ch. 4, "Goals", pp. 93 to 117. Bob Beamon's 1968 long jump and the next peak experience question at p. 100; the Burkeman quotation at p. 117; Schreiber and Sim at p. 113.
  2. Allen, E. J., Dechow, P. M., Pope, D. G., & Wu, G. (2017). Management Science. Round-number bunching across roughly 9.5 million marathon finishing times. Cite this rather than the book.
  3. Michael Larson's Press Your Luck winnings of $110,237 match the standard record.