A Stuffed Alien Beat the Written Reminder, 92% to 78%

In the first experiment of a 2016 paper, the researchers put an elephant statuette on a lab counter. Participants had been asked to pick up a paper clip on the way out of the session, which would send $1 to a food bank. Of 38 people in the control group, 16 did it. Of 39 in the group whose reminder was tied to the elephant, 29 did.

That result, from Todd Rogers and Katherine Milkman’s “Reminders Through Association” (Psychological Science, 2016, volume 27, issue 7, pages 973-986), is the short answer to a question most people never ask about their own plans: where does the reminder live? Rogers and Milkman found that tying an intention to a distinctive object in the place where you will act on it raised follow-through, and in one online test it beat a written reminder.

The idea in the abstract

The authors separate two reasons people fail to follow through. One is limited self-control. The other, in their words, “is simply forgetting to enact intentions when opportunities arise.” Their approach targets the second. You pair an intention with a cue that will “capture attention when you have opportunities to act,” and the example they give is mailing a letter tomorrow, with flowers that arrived late yesterday sitting on your desk.

Two conditions make the cue work, according to the abstract: it has to be distinctive compared with other things you routinely encounter, and compared with other things in view at the same moment. The paper has six experiments, labeled 1, 2a, 2b, 3, 4 and 5. Here is what each one found.

Study by study

Study 1 was the elephant statuette described above: 74% (29 of 39) against 42% (16 of 38), among the 77 people out of 87 recruited who reported having the intention. A footnote in the paper concedes that the control message was not parallel to the treatment message, which later studies corrected.

Studies 2a and 2b moved online and manipulated how distinctive the cue was. Participants on a survey platform were asked to choose a particular answer near the end of a ten-minute survey, which sent $0.30 to a charity. In 2a, a cartoon elephant replaced the “next” button. When the nine earlier pages had shown other cartoon animals, so the elephant stood out, 74% (252 of 342) followed through. When those pages had shown assorted cartoon elephants, 53% (170 of 319) did. In 2b, a stuffed bear in a photo worked better when it was the only stuffed animal in the picture (82%) than when four others sat beside it (70%).

Study 3 is the one in the title. A stuffed alien toy was the cue, and the comparison group saw a written reminder sign, in a survey with signage on six of the nine earlier pages. Among 126 people who reported the intention, 92% followed through in the alien condition, 78% with the written sign and 71% in the control. The alien beat the sign (p = .025) and the control (p = .003). The written sign did not reliably beat the control (78% versus 71%, p = .413).

Study 4 left the screen. On Tuesday, May 14, 2014, 500 customers leaving a Cambridge, Massachusetts cafe between 7 a.m. and 2 p.m. received a flyer. Half got a $1-off coupon flyer with a picture of the alien and reminder text, and half got a control flyer. A stuffed alien also sat on both cash registers on Thursday, when the coupon could be used. Redemption was 24% against 17%. With a two-tailed test, that gap was marginal (p = .083). The authors report that it is significant on a one-tailed test.

Do people see this coming?

Study 5 asked whether people value cue reminders enough to use them. Everyone in a “forced” group saw the elephant cue, and 87% earned a $0.60 bonus, against 59% in a no-cue group. A third group could pay $0.03 to see it, and 53% did; their bonus rate was 74%. When the cue was free, 92% opted in and 90% earned the bonus. The authors infer that the cost-paying group’s decliners would have earned about 20% more had they used it. That figure is a modeled estimate, not an observed one.

The abstract calls cue-based reminders “undervalued and underused,” and the evidence on reminders more broadly is uneven. A survey of Ethiopian mothers on HIV treatment concluded that an alarm clock reminder was linked to better adherence without anyone having been assigned a clock, which is why an experiment with a control group, like Rogers and Milkman’s, carries more weight.

What the studies cannot say

All the tasks were trivial and brief. The cue had to prompt a single click or a pickup, and the payoff was small and immediate or arrived within days. Nothing here shows the effect on a habit that must be repeated at 6 a.m. for a month.

The online samples also excluded a large share of participants. The analyses in Studies 1 to 3 kept only people who reported having the intention, which was 72% to 89% of those who completed them, so the percentages describe people who reported having the intention, not everyone assigned a condition. The authors themselves note that digital reminders may beat associative ones in some situations, that building the cue takes cognitive effort, and that they have not separated whether the cue helps people encode the intention or retrieve it later. Study 4’s field result also sits just outside the usual threshold.

Finally, cues that work once can wear out. A stuffed alien seen once is distinctive; a stuffed alien on your desk for six months is furniture. The paper’s own logic implies this but no experiment ran long enough to test it.

Where an alarm sits in this picture

An alarm is a cue that arrives at a known time, and many people set it to the same tone every day. By the paper’s distinctiveness criteria, a sound you hear daily is a weak candidate for carrying an intention. Reminders have been tested against comparison groups in the field before, as with New York City’s redesigned court summons and its text messages, but no study I found pits an alarm against a distinctive object, so this reading is an inference from the criteria and not a finding.

DontSnooze is an iOS alarm app that asks for a video of you awake when the alarm fires and sends it to friends who are watching; the full walkthrough of how it works covers the steps. What changes at the moment of the alarm is who will see the result, which makes it a different kind of cue from a statuette. That comparison is not in the Rogers and Milkman paper.

If you want to try the original idea with nothing but a table, remember what the experiments varied: an object that stands out from your usual scenery, placed where the action will happen. A second earlier piece, on whether phone reminders weaken memory, covers what is known about relying on devices for the remembering.

Questions readers ask about cue-based reminders

Can an ordinary household object work as the cue?

The paper’s own example is a late Valentine’s Day flower delivery sitting on a desk to remind someone to mail a letter. The studies themselves used an elephant statuette, cartoon elephants, a stuffed bear and a stuffed alien, so no kitchen-table object was tested. What the authors varied was distinctiveness: the cue had to stand out from what people see routinely and from what is in view at the same moment. By their logic, an object you pass every day without noticing would sit in the indistinctive condition.

Why were all the tasks so small?

Each task cost seconds and paid a few cents to a dollar: picking up a paper clip so $1 went to a food bank, choosing one answer to send $0.30 to a charity, selecting one answer for a $0.60 bonus, or redeeming a $1-off coupon. The authors frame the approach as a remedy for forgetting, which they separate from limited self-control. Nobody in these studies had to overcome a strong urge to do something else, so the results say little about tasks people dread.

Who took part, and does that limit the findings?

Most participants were online workers recruited through Amazon Mechanical Turk, with mean ages between 31 and 34 across the online studies. Study 1 recruited through campus newspaper ads at several Northeastern universities, and Study 4 used customers of one Cambridge, Massachusetts cafe on a single Tuesday in May 2014. Early-morning behavior, repeated daily tasks and long follow-up periods were not part of any experiment.