On October 30th 2025 we at the Beaverton Hummer posted on Instagram a Google Form asking about the students and staff of Beaverton High Schools favorite candy. This google form had a total of three questions: The respondent’s position (Student/Staff), grade, and favorite candy.
After months of letting the form wait, we are ready to share the results. After 70 days we have gained two responses. Both responses are from students, one from a Sophomore and one from a Junior. Their favorite candies are Fun Dip and Starbursts respectively.
Looking at the insights from this post we can see it has gained 1,418 views, 10 likes, and two shares over the course of 70 days. Not only that but the official school Instagram also shared our post on their story. All of these statistics combined asks only one question: Why did we get only two responses?
A possible reason why we were deprived of responses is because there’s no reason to respond. Why would anyone take time out of their day to fill out a forum with no real rewards? While over a thousand people saw the post, only a couple chose to take time out of their day to fill out the forum.
If a person doesn’t see value in doing a task, then they won’t do it, but why is that? What is motivation and how can it have so much power over what we do? Elenor Simpson and Peter Balmson in The Behavioral Neuroscience of Motivation define motivation as “The Energizing of Behavior in pursuit of a goal.” Furthermore they state, “In all cases the goals must be met in appropriate quantities and at appropriate times.”
In our Forum experiment we gave no incentive to complete the forum and no reward or consequence for its completion. The only driving factor is helping others write an article, which isn’t enough for many people. We didn’t give enough incentive, thus explaining why we didn’t receive many responses. If we claimed, “A random respondent would be rewarded with their favorite candy.” then it’s likely we would have gotten more responses. They would have been motivated by the candy.
It’s difficult to bash other people about lacking motivation when we at the Hummer are guilty as well. We have been working on this article for months and are just now writing and editing it. We’ve been procrastinating on our one job because we lacked motivation. We’re sorry and we hope we can write articles sooner and more efficiently.
At the end of the day, an article is a small thing, and a forum is even less. When it comes to unimportant things, procrastination isn’t the worst thing in the world, as long as it’s not in excess.
