The Sydney Marathon was last month, and as I tracked my friends getting over the finish line, one thing was constant, they all sped up for that last few hundred metres. That has happened to me too, and it is actually a psychological pattern called the goal gradient effect, the psychology of almost there. And it doesn’t just happen in running!
From a consumer behaviour perspective, think of a coffee stamp card. Research has shown that the inter-purchase interval (the time between purchases), gets noticeably shorter as the card fills up, so someone with one stamp left comes back faster than someone with four left. Getting from one stamp to two takes exactly the same effort as getting from four to five, but we behave differently.
The goal gradient effect, originally from Clark Hull1 in 1932, states that the tendency to approach a goal increases with proximity to the goal. Hull tested this on rats, who ran progressively faster as they got closer to food, demonstrating their increasing motivation as they got visibly closer to the goal.
