The “Carrot on a Stick” effect

The carrot on a stick effect is when humans actually achieve better things cause an arbitrary number was set as a goal and humans tried to reach it. They show up basically everywhere as long as you're looking for it. Let me explain. This is a weight stack and you can see it basically follows a normal distribution. Very few people are using the extremely light weights. As it gets more to an average weight, more people use it. And as it gets heavier, less and less people use it until you get all the way down to 95 pounds where basically no one uses it. And then it jumps up to a hundred when people start using it even more. Humans are not necessarily all of a sudden stronger at 100 pounds, but because there's an arbitrary goal set for them to meet, humans just meet it. You might think this is just completely random, but it's not. Take a look at what marathon times actually look like. Instead of getting a normal distribution of marathon times, you get random spikes at very specific numbers. For example, there's a huge spike of people who push harder just to finish before the three hour mark. Same with three and a half and same with four hours. And if you look at male self-reported height, you'll see the exact same thing. Reality, the heights lie on a normal distribution, but when they self-report, suddenly there's no males that are 5'11 and there's a ton of males that are exactly 6 foot on the dot.