Do leaderboards motivate or discourage? What studies show

Leaderboards can lift effort like a hard goal, or quietly drain motivation from people near the bottom. What experiments show, and how to use one well.

OutBrick Editorial DeskPlayer experience & design research

7 min read
Published September 24, 2026

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A leaderboard is the simplest social feature a game can have: a list of names, ranked. It is also one of the most argued about. Some people find it the best reason to play one more round; others glance at it once, see themselves at number 48,112, and never open it again. Psychologists and human-computer interaction researchers have been testing leaderboards for more than a decade, in classrooms, on crowdsourcing sites and in the lab. The answer to “do they work?” turns out to be “for what, and for whom?”

A leaderboard works like a goal

Richard Landers and colleagues offered the clearest explanation of why leaderboards work when they do. They drew on goal-setting theory, one of the best-established ideas in work psychology: specific, difficult goals tend to produce more effort than vague instructions to “do your best”. A leaderboard, they argued, is a goal in disguise. The score above yours tells you exactly what to aim for next.

To test this they gave undergraduates a creativity task, listing as many uses for a knife as they could, under different instructions: do your best, an easy target, a difficult target, an impossible one, or a leaderboard showing other people’s scores. The leaderboard group performed at about the level of the difficult and impossible goal groups, and better than those told to do their best or given an easy target.

An earlier field study by Landers and Amy Landers found the same pattern in a real course. Students randomly assigned to a version of an online wiki project with a leaderboard, not tied to grades, interacted with the project around 30 more times on average than students without one, and that extra time on task went with better results.

Seen this way, much of the folklore about leaderboards makes sense. They help most when the task is simple and effort is the main thing standing between a person and a better score, as with listing uses for a knife or contributing to a class project. They help less when the task needs careful thought, because a harder goal does not make anyone think more clearly. And they depend on people caring about the number in the first place: a board with no audience and no stakes is just a list.

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More effort, not necessarily more enjoyment

The goal explanation also predicts a limit. A goal can push effort up without making the task any more pleasant. Elisa Mekler and colleagues tested exactly this with an online image-tagging task, adding points, levels or a leaderboard in turn. Every game element increased the number of tags people produced. None of them made a significant difference to how competent people felt or how intrinsically motivated they were.

For a game designer, that is an important distinction. A leaderboard is a good tool for encouraging one more attempt, and a poor substitute for a game that is satisfying on its own terms. When it is the only thing holding a player’s interest, the interest tends to last only as long as the ranking feels winnable.

There is a quieter cost as well. Effort that comes from a ranking is effort pointed at the ranking. In Mekler’s study the extra work showed up as more tags, not better ones, and the leaderboard gave people no reason to care about quality. In a game, the equivalent is players repeating the easiest level for points rather than trying the interesting hard one. A board rewards whatever it counts, so what it counts deserves as much thought as whether to have one at all.

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Who is on the board changes what it does

Leaderboards are social comparison made visible, and comparison cuts both ways. Katheryn Christy and Jesse Fox put women in a virtual classroom where a leaderboard was dominated by men’s names, dominated by women’s names, or absent, and then gave them a maths test. The women who saw the board topped by other women scored lower than those who saw one topped by men. The result did not fit the simple story the researchers set out to test, and it underlines a practical point: the names and faces on a board carry messages of their own.

The most cautionary study is also one of the longest. Michael Hanus and Jesse Fox followed students through a university course over a semester, comparing a gamified version, with badges and a leaderboard, with a version without them. Students in the gamified course reported declining intrinsic motivation, satisfaction and empowerment over time compared with the other section. It was one course at one university, but it is a useful reminder that a feature can lift activity in a short experiment and still wear people down over months.

Most of these studies used students and short tasks. Leaderboards in games may work differently, and the evidence there is thinner.

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The view from the bottom

A goal only motivates when it feels reachable. For the player at the top, a global leaderboard is a clear, difficult target. For almost everyone else it is a number so large it stops meaning anything, or a daily confirmation of being worse than strangers.

Goal-setting research has a name for this: goals help when people are committed to them, and commitment falls away when a goal looks impossible. Landers and colleagues framed leaderboards in exactly these terms: a board works as a goal only to the extent that people accept the goal it sets. Put the same person on a board with a million entries and the nearest meaningful target may be thousands of places away. The feature is identical; the goal it sets is not.

This is also why the same leaderboard can feel completely different to two people using it at the same moment. The player in third place sees a race. The player in ten-thousandth place sees a wall. Designers have developed several ways around this, and they map neatly onto the research.

Show the neighbourhood, not the summit: the few scores just above and below yours are a reachable goal.
Rank among friends rather than the whole world, so the comparison is with people whose lives look like yours.
Reset often. A weekly board gives everyone a fresh start and a new chance of a good week.
Offer a personal best alongside the ranking, so improving on yourself counts as a win.
Keep it optional. Players who find comparison stressful should be able to ignore it without losing anything.

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Using leaderboards well as a player

If you like leaderboards, treat them as the research suggests: as a goal-setting tool. Pick a target a little above where you are, not the top of the world. If you notice a board making you anxious or making a game feel like work, that is information too, and it is fine to close it and play for the puzzle itself. Our piece on how games become habits looks at the difference between a reason to return and a pull you cannot refuse.

Many of the most pleasant forms of comparison are small ones: two friends, one board, a result to share. The daily board works that way, with a plain three-star result you can send to someone without spoiling the solution. For the bigger picture of when points and badges help, see does gamification work? What the meta-analyses say, and for competition among friends, friendly competition without the pressure.

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Questions, answered

A few useful answers

Do leaderboards increase motivation?

They tend to increase effort. In experiments, adding a leaderboard raised performance about as much as setting a difficult goal. Studies have found little evidence that leaderboards make a task more enjoyable in itself.

Can leaderboards be demotivating?

Yes. One semester-long classroom study found that students in a course with badges and a leaderboard reported lower intrinsic motivation and satisfaction over time. A global ranking can also feel meaningless or discouraging to players far from the top.

What makes a good leaderboard in a game?

One that shows reachable goals: the scores just around yours, rankings among friends, regular resets and a personal best. It should also be easy to ignore for players who do not enjoy comparison.

Why do leaderboards work at all?

Researchers explain them with goal-setting theory. The score just above yours is a specific, challenging target, and specific, difficult goals reliably produce more effort than vague ones.

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References

Where a source is a studio’s own history or a news account rather than a study, the article says so beside the claim.

Landers, R. N., Bauer, K. N., & Callan, R. C. (2017). Gamification of task performance with leaderboards: A goal setting experiment. Computers in Human Behavior, 71, 508–515. doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2015.08.008 (opens in a new tab)
Landers, R. N., & Landers, A. K. (2014). An empirical test of the theory of gamified learning: The effect of leaderboards on time-on-task and academic performance. Simulation & Gaming, 45(6), 769–785. doi.org/10.1177/1046878114563662 (opens in a new tab)
Mekler, E. D., Brühlmann, F., Tuch, A. N., & Opwis, K. (2017). Towards understanding the effects of individual gamification elements on intrinsic motivation and performance. Computers in Human Behavior, 71, 525–534. doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2015.08.048 (opens in a new tab)
Christy, K. R., & Fox, J. (2014). Leaderboards in a virtual classroom: A test of stereotype threat and social comparison explanations for women’s math performance. Computers & Education, 78, 66–77. doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2014.05.005 (opens in a new tab)
Hanus, M. D., & Fox, J. (2015). Assessing the effects of gamification in the classroom: A longitudinal study on intrinsic motivation, social comparison, satisfaction, effort, and academic performance. Computers & Education, 80, 152–161. doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2014.08.019 (opens in a new tab)

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OutBrick Editorial Desk

The OutBrick Editorial Desk turns player research, accessibility practice, and game-making lessons into useful, readable notes.