A watched pot seems slow to boil: Why frequent monitoring decreases perceptions of progress.

Abstract

In evaluating changing attributes (e.g., work output, pollution levels), perceivers care not only about an attribute's level but its rate of change. Two employees likely have different value in the eyes of a supervisor if they take different amounts of time to complete the same work. Ten studies in the main article (and five in the Supplemental Materials) document and explore a monitoring frequency effect (MFE): Progress is seen to slow to the extent it is monitored more frequently. This effect was observed across various domains (workplace, public health, environmental, investment, physical growth) and was robust to financial incentives that encouraged accuracy. Several factors are identified that affect preferences for monitoring targets more or less frequently. Participants also displayed preferences for how frequently they themselves would be monitored; this investigation directly revealed the counterintuitive nature of the MFE. Although the MFE was robust to all tested variants, the size of the MFE did depend on how information about attribute changes was presented. Two mechanistic accounts-one rooted in memory biases for tracked information and the other in a failure to synthesize the tracked information in a normative way-were tested. Only the latter was supported. Discussion focuses on how the MFE complements or only superficially contradicts previous work on myopic loss aversion, the ratio bias, partition dependence, and tracking goal progress. The MFE identifies a qualitatively distinct way by which prior evaluations and beliefs can color evaluations of targets, thereby reinforcing even misguided priors. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2025 APA, all rights reserved).