"The Commitment Contract concept is based on two well known principles of behavioral economics:
1.People don't always do what they claim they want to do, and
2.Incentives get people to do things"
What is this site about? What behavioral principles do they use? Do you think this is a good site? What could you do to imporve on it?
stickK.com introduces accountability for following up on one's goals, and that is just one further step in having effective goals. It introduces even more motivation for setting goals and following through, beyond the existing feelings of accomplishment coupled with the physical or psychological benefits that result from most goals anyways.
During sport psychology courses, we spend a fair amount of time focusing on goal setting. There are two particular topics we've discussed that stick out to me in this situation. The first is the SMART principle, which is an acronym intended to represent the different facets of successful goal setting; that goals should be Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timely.
Specific: stickK.com's custom commitments could be made to be somewhat inspecific, but most of their preset goals were pretty specific. They didn't include a plan for reaching goals, which would be beneficial, but do include weekly checkpoints.
Measurable: Outside of a few subcategories of the custom commitments, they do a good job of establishing quantifiable long-term and short-term benchmarks. Having those benchmarks to shoot for as "mini-successes" building up to your final goal are very beneficial in reaching the end result.
Achievable: In this case, stickK.com doesn't know enough about the antecedents in order to judge whether or not the goal is truly achievable. But, Achievable does sort of overlap with Realistic, and..
Realistic: With the "Weight loss" commitment, the program calculates your BMI (a possibly incomplete and misleading measure, but that's a point for a different day, as BMI does its job in this situation) and doesn't allow you to set a final goal which would fall into an unhealthy BMI category. It also does not require you to lose more than 1 pound per week, which is a very good adjustment for the program. It makes the short term goals realistic but still helpful.
Timely: The website establishes weekly check ins (which can be optional), and provides you the chance to pay a fee (which, again, is optional) as punishment for not meeting your short term goals.
So, when it comes to the SMART principle, stickK.com comes just about as close as a simple broad website with their intentions can get, while still being effective and appealing to people.
The 2nd goal setting topic that jumps to mind with stickK.com's setup is the idea that you need to make goals public in order to be held accountable. When setting goals in an athletic environment, its much more effective to make both the team's and the individual's goals public, and possibly establish positive/negative reinforcements for accomplishing or missing goals (avoid punishments). Having the athletes monitor each others progress and performance is an effective way to ensure the goals are kept in daily thought. This is basically the concept that the website revolves around, so if there is actually enough incentive (whether intrinsic, monetary, or peer-related), then it accomplishes this goal. Though it is sort of a funny idea to have the "supporting/watching" feature on the internet, which is as anonymous as you want it to be. If you really had people you cared about who were both willing and able to monitor your progress on a goal, why use this website when you could just do it in reality? Making the goal "public" is a great and proven idea, but are you really going to be more motivated to achieve a goal if PunkRawkr6969 is "supporting" or "watching" your progress, when you have no idea who they are?
Given the fact that everyone affiliated with the site has a background in law, economics, and business you can answer pretty cynically about what the real purpose of this site is. However, at face value it is about sticking to your goals.
Based on the two principles of behavioral economics they list, it is assumed that having a formalized "contract" will act as a reinforcer or punisher towards whatever behavior is listed within the contract.
It would seem that due to the adaptability of the site it could act as either a pleasurable or aversive stimulus as well. If you require a lot of positive feedback to stick with your goals (positive reinforcement) then the comments you get from others by making it public would act as a motivating influence (a reinforcer) for you. However, if the fear of failure is a highly motivating influence for you then the threat of putting money on the line for not responding or failing (negative reinforcement) would act as a reinforcer.
Certainly the site is tapping into these behavior principles, and key terms. However I don't think it's a very good site. The interface is just not very visually appealing to me, it would be interesting to know if this is a common view or just me?
Also although it is intuitively a neat idea, there seems to be the same problems with this website as with any "quick fix" to behavioral problems. I would imagine a high rate of relapse for people who use the short-term goal setting, and a high drop-out rate for those who set very long term goals b/c the immediate appeal would fall away. If a person could achieve there goals on this website I'd imagine any option they chose would have lead to success more so due to their commitment itself, rather than on any benefits of this particular site.