B. Harkin

Who they are

B. Harkin is a psychology researcher whose work is recorded here through one paper: the 2016 meta-analysis of experiments on monitoring goal progress, published in Psychological Bulletin in volume 142, issue 2. A fuller biography, including the author's full name, is not recorded on this site.

The paper's co-authors were T. L. Webb, B. P. I. Chang, A. Prestwich, M. Conner, I. Kellar, Y. Benn and P. Sheeran. It is cited in the Why We Project in articles on goals and on management frameworks, including What are the 4 Disciplines of Execution?, where it is the nearest independent research to the third and fourth disciplines.

Key papers

Harkin, B., Webb, T. L., Chang, B. P. I., Prestwich, A., Conner, M., Kellar, I., Benn, Y., and Sheeran, P. (2016). Does monitoring goal progress promote goal attainment? A meta-analysis of the experimental evidence. Psychological Bulletin, 142(2), 198-229. doi:10.1037/bul0000025.

Key ideas

The paper treats monitoring progress as a step between setting a goal and reaching it, in line with control theory and other self-regulation accounts. It reviewed randomised experiments that compared interventions designed to promote monitoring against control conditions, 138 studies with nearly 20,000 participants.

The interventions substantially increased how often people monitored their progress, and they produced a smaller but reliable improvement in goal attainment. Part of the effect on attainment ran through the change in monitoring frequency. The improvement was larger when outcomes were reported or made public and when progress was physically recorded. The authors concluded that monitoring goal progress is an effective self-regulation strategy.

The concept is described on the page for Progress Monitoring. In the Why We Project it is read alongside goal-setting research (see Goal Setting Theory), which found that goals combined with feedback on progress worked better than goals alone.

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