Self-Completion Theory
People who are pursuing an identity, not just a task, are collecting two things at once: the thing itself, and the standing of being someone who does it. Self-completion theory holds that the standing can be acquired symbolically, in advance of the doing, and that once it has been acquired the pressure to do the rest of the work falls. Gollwitzer, Sheeran, Michalski and Seifert tested the prediction in 2009 across four experiments in Psychological Science. Identity-related intentions that other people noticed were acted on less intensively than intentions that went unnoticed. It held among participants strongly committed to the identity goal and not among the weakly committed. These are studies of announced intentions, not of work shown.
What it is
The theory begins with a claim about what a goal is for. Some goals are simply outcomes you want. Others are constitutive: reading law periodicals in order to become a lawyer, learning an instrument in order to be a musician, writing in order to be a writer. For that second kind, the activity is not only a means to an end. It is evidence, submitted to yourself and to other people, that a particular self-definition is warranted.
Robert Wicklund and Peter Gollwitzer set the framework out in Symbolic Self Completion in 1982. Their argument was that people pursuing an incomplete self-definition seek out and display symbols of it, and that the symbols are substitutable. A qualification, a title, a piece of equipment, a public statement of what you are becoming: each is a partial claim on the identity, and each does some of the work that the actual competence would otherwise have to do. The word symbolic is doing real work in the phrase. The theory does not say the person is lying. It says the mind treats a symbol of the identity and a demonstration of it as, to some degree, interchangeable currency.
The uncomfortable corollary is that recognition from another person is one of the strongest symbols available, and it is free. Being noticed as the sort of person who is doing the thing settles part of the account. And once part of the account is settled, the balance owing on the work itself is smaller.
This is what the 2009 experiments were built to test. The design is neat: an identity-relevant intention is stated, and the only thing manipulated is whether somebody else takes notice of it. Participants whose intentions were noticed subsequently acted on them less intensively than participants whose intentions were ignored. The effect appeared in persistent striving over a week in the field and in the taking of opportunities to act in the laboratory.
The detail that makes the mechanism credible, rather than merely the result surprising, is the moderation. The effect held among participants who were strongly committed to the identity goal, and it did not hold among the weakly committed. That is what the theory predicts and what a more boring explanation would not. If being noticed simply distracted people, or made them self-conscious, the weakly committed should have suffered too. Instead the cost falls exactly where the recognition is worth something. The more the goal defines you, the more a nod of acknowledgement is worth absorbing, and the more of your motivation it can absorb.
It is worth being clear about the size of the claim. This is one paper, four experiments, one research group, and it is cited on this site as primary evidence rather than as a settled body of literature. The mechanism is plausible and the moderation pattern is the kind of internal evidence that is hard to get by accident. It is not the same thing as a meta-analysis.