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Lerner Professor Researches How Streaks Motivate Us
A 5-minute profile of research on why streaks motivate, and why a broken one stings
Why it’s worth your time
If you track anything as a streak, from a language app to a weekly update, this short profile of Jackie Silverman's research explains why the day it breaks can sting more than the miss itself. Seeing that coming can make a reset easier to shrug off.
Planning for the day a streak breaks
The essay · 5 min · Free
Opens their site. We don’t copy it here; we’d rather they get the read.
- Read the article.
Read for the brewery visit that started Silverman's research, her explanation of why a broken streak hurts, and the experiment where the rule for what counted as a streak changed how motivated people felt.
- Write the rule for a missed week.
Pick one habit you track at work. Write one sentence on what counts toward the streak, such as any week with one update, and one on what happens after a miss: whether the run pauses or starts over.
Good moments for this: the day a streak breakswhen you set up a trackerafter a holiday week
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Making it work for you
Every workplace is different. Here’s what to think about before you start, and what might get in the way.
Things to think about
Silverman says what counts as a streak is malleable: in one experiment, people told their streak was intact stayed more motivated than people doing the same play without one. A looser rule, set at the start, can keep one busy week from ending a run.
What might make this harder
Silverman and Barasch's findings suggest a visible counter can push people to protect the number. If you lead the team, ask whether a counter that resets to zero is helping the work or only the number.
Questions people ask
Why is breaking a streak so demotivating?
Silverman's explanation is that you lose twice: you missed the thing you were tracking, and you also failed at keeping the streak alive.
What is Lerner Professor Researches How Streaks Motivate Us about?
A 2024 University of Delaware article by Andrew Sharp on research by marketing professor Jackie Silverman and Alixandra Barasch, finding that streaks motivate people, that a streak can become a goal in itself, and that a broken one tends to cut motivation.
How do I stay motivated after breaking a streak?
Keep the habit separate from the number: do a short version the next day, and use a repair or a new count if your tracker allows one. Ask yourself what the streak was for in the first place.
What it says, and how it holds up
Apps like Duolingo and Peloton track your streaks, and the research this article profiles suggests the counting works. Silverman and Barasch surveyed people about their apps and ran experiments with test apps that changed how streaks were shown, and people kept going more when their log displayed an intact run. The catch is that the streak turns into something to protect for its own sake. Their paper in the Journal of Consumer Research says, across seven studies, that the effect came from how past behavior was shown in the log, independent of the behavior itself.
The piece is a light, readable news story from Silverman's own business school, and it covers a second paper too. With Barasch and Deborah Small, Silverman found that people in hypothetical scenarios felt surer of keeping a goal going after three days in a row than after three days scattered across a week, and judged other people the same way. She notes this matters for anyone reading someone else's record, from a school tracking attendance to a manager reviewing sales.
That last point is where the research reaches past your own habits. If you're the one assessing a colleague, a recent run of strong weeks can look more convincing than the same results spread unevenly, and in a review the total over the period may be the fairer number to read.
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Picked by Truest and described in our own words. The original belongs to its creator. Last updated October 9, 2026. We sell a career membership; where that’s relevant above, we say so.