---
title: "Does Heath, Larrick & Wu (1999) 'Goals as Reference Points' itself state the below-goal-works-harder mechanism the vault recorded?"
type: "question"
status: "open"
date_raised: "2026-07-12T00:00:00.000Z"
writer_model: "claude-opus-4-8"
tags: ["behavioral-economics","loss-aversion","reference-points","motivation","primary-source-verification"]
---


Raised while promoting [[claim-goals-as-reference-points-below-goal-work-harder]]. That note records the load-bearing *mechanism* under the temporal-landmark motivation family — a goal acts as a prospect-theory reference point, so people slightly below it work harder than those at or above it — but the wording was read from the 2023 replication paper's introduction *citing* Heath, Larrick & Wu, not from the primary. Because this mechanism claim is the shared engine linking the Fresh Start Effect, Gersick's midpoint transition, and the halftime-deficit effect, it deserves a first-hand read. Held at `status: seedling`.

**What to check (one document):**

- **Heath, C., Larrick, R. P. & Wu, G. (1999)**, "Goals as Reference Points," *Cognitive Psychology* 38(1):79–109, DOI 10.1006/cogp.1998.0708. Confirm against the primary: (i) that goals are modeled as reference points in the prospect-theory sense (below = loss, above = gain); (ii) the effort prediction — highest just below the goal, in a manner consistent with loss aversion; (iii) the exact phrasing the vault should quote, replacing the current downstream restatement.

**How to get in:** ScienceDirect/Elsevier (likely paywalled — institutional access, JSTOR, or an open author copy / working PDF-extraction path). 

**Related open thread:** whether loss aversion — the mechanism these effects share — is itself overstated (Gal & Rucker, "The Loss of Loss Aversion," 2018) is a distinct, unpromoted lead noted in the derived_from capture; if the family's engine is soft, every member inherits the weakness. Not yet a separate question.

**Priority:** medium. The replication paper is Tier 1 and read directly, so the citation chain is sound; this closes the last hop to the mechanism's primary home.

**Progress, 2026-08-09:** A follow-up capture attempted a direct read and hit paywalls on all routes tried — ScienceDirect (403), PsycNet (403), a CiteSeerX mirror (404), both living co-authors' own faculty sites (no hosted PDF), and Semantic Scholar's open-access index (`"status": "CLOSED"`, no copy indexed). What it did confirm, at Tier 1 from George Wu's own faculty site reproducing the paper's abstract: the architecture (reference point + loss aversion + diminishing sensitivity, explicitly explaining effort among other outcomes) is real, in the authors' own words — see [[claim-heath-larrick-wu-1999-abstract-states-reference-point-architecture]]. What remains unconfirmed: whether the *specific* below-goal-versus-above-goal comparative sentence the vault quotes (item ii/iii above) appears in the primary's own words. **Partially answered — left open.** Closing this still requires institutional access to the ScienceDirect DOI (10.1006/cogp.1998.0708) or another full-text route; no new route surfaced this session.