5 Reasons that Stickers aren’t Just for Kids

When you donate blood, or vote in an election, you are frequently rewarded with a sticker. One that you wear with pride for the rest of the day.

These little stickers may seem like a gimmick, but people report that the stickers actually bring them pleasure and help encourage them to participate in elections or to give blood, according to Good. If it sounds surprising that 18+-year-olds are motivated by a sticker, it shouldn’t. 

Stickers aren’t just for kids anymore; More and more adults are turning to stickers to reward and motivate themselves. And, these dime-a-dozen novelty items actually work as an incentive because they tap into a number of psychological concepts that ring true for all ages.

Makes Successes Visual
Create a sticker chart  to reward yourself and to  provide a concrete and visual way to show progress. When sticker-chart users look back at the chart and see rows and rows of stickers, they can easily see all the times they succeeded. At the same time, they can minimize failures, by recognizing that they are less common than successes.

Psychologist Rod Mitchell explains, “The stickers on the chart serve as small badges of who you are and what you did. A client I had who was struggling to make time for his kids now looks back on a chart full of stickers and knows that he’s become the family man he wanted to be.”

The Guardian reports that if you find yourself getting dejected or giving up after missing a few days and losing momentum on a sticker chart, you can consider using a different color or style sticker on skip days, rather than leaving the sticker off altogether.

Lucy Mountain, an entrepreneur who sells sticker charts, tells The Guardian that, “It’s trying to keep momentum going, because it’s not about perfection. It’s just about trying to be consistent as much as you can.” 

Breaks Down Large Goals
Many of the efforts, aspirations, and actions that adults accomplish in their daily lives don’t translate easily into achievable goals. Some goals, like learning a new language, may be too large to incrementally perceive progress, while others, like eating vegetables every day, don’t have a set date for mission accomplished.

“Humans and animals work for rewards,” says Kou Murayama, an investigator at a lab in Germany that studies motivation science, “That is their nature. Hitting a goal itself serves as a reward for humans, even if it does not give you tangible rewards such as food or money.” 

Sticker charts that reward and celebrate progress break down these types of goals into specific and short-term achievable steps. A blog on Psychology Today describes it as instant gratification for progress towards a delayed gratification goal.

Allows People to Unplug
Visual progress towards goals is found everywhere these days from earning streaks for logging into self-improvement apps to progress bars in games and learning programs. 

However, The Guardian explains, there is something unique about earning a physical item instead of a digital reward. Bek Gray, a sticker chart user who motivated herself to go to the gym every day says that, “There’s only so many times you can get told off by an app or your watch. This is a nicer way of trying to motivate and discipline yourself.”