In 2018, researchers at Harvard ran a simple experiment. Participants were shown a series of dots ranging from clearly blue to clearly purple and asked to say which ones were blue. As the proportion of genuinely blue dots in the series was gradually reduced, something unexpected happened: people started calling dots blue that weren’t blue at all. Their internal definition of “blue” had quietly expanded to fill the gap left by the disappearing blue dots. Telling participants in advance that this would happen, or paying them to stay accurate, didn’t stop it.
It wasn’t just about dots
The researchers, led by psychologist David Levari and published in the journal Science, ran the same test using faces rated as threatening or non-threatening. As genuinely threatening faces became rarer, neutral faces increasingly started getting flagged as threatening instead. They tried it again with research proposals rated as ethical or unethical, asking participants to act as review-board members – and as clearly unethical proposals became scarcer, borderline ones got rejected more often. The pattern held across all three: the less of a problem there objectively was, the more the definition of “problem” stretched to compensate. Researchers call this prevalence-induced concept change; “the blue dot effect” is the name it’s picked up in less formal discussion of the findings, but it’s the same study.
Where we see something similar
To be clear, the original research is about perception and judgement, not money – nobody involved in that study was looking at financial behaviour. But we’d be lying if we said it didn’t remind us of something we see regularly in client conversations. Someone spends years working towards a specific number – enough to retire on, enough to feel secure, enough that money stops being a source of stress – and when they actually reach it, the relief tends to be short-lived. A new worry moves in almost immediately to occupy the space the old one used to fill: market volatility, a child’s future, the state of the economy, whether they’ve accounted for every eventuality. The target was real and the achievement was real, but the feeling of having “enough” somehow never quite arrives.
It’s worth being honest that this is our own observation rather than a finding from the study itself, but the shape of it is hard to miss once you’ve noticed it a few times: solve the problem you can see, and attention simply recalibrates to find the next one, in the same way a shrinking pool of blue dots eventually gets topped back up with purple ones.
It isn’t a fixed trait
A follow-up paper in 2022 revisited the original findings and showed the effect can be reduced, and in some conditions removed altogether, when people are given clearer feedback about how the prevalence of what they’re judging is actually changing over time. In other words, this isn’t some immovable law of how the brain works that you’re simply stuck with – it responds to better information. That’s a useful detail, because it points fairly directly at what actually interrupts the pattern: not willpower, but something concrete to check your judgement against.
What actually seems to help
The one thing that reliably interrupts this, in our experience, is turning “enough” from a feeling into a number. A cashflow model does exactly that – rather than a vague sense of whether things feel secure, it shows concretely what your money can sustain, tested against a downturn, a change in circumstances, or living longer than expected. We’ve written more about how that process works in practice, and separately, the Pensions and Lifetime Savings Association’s published benchmarks for what a moderate or comfortable retirement actually costs give a useful external reference point too – both are covered in our guide to retirement income that lasts. Neither removes the instinct to keep scanning for the next problem entirely – that instinct seems to be fairly hard-wired – but having a specific, tested number to check back against makes it much easier to recognise when a new worry is genuinely worth acting on, and when it’s just the goalposts moving again.
Let’s put a number on your own “enough”
We work with clients across Poole, Bournemouth and the wider Dorset area to turn a vague sense of financial security into something specific and testable, and to revisit that number as circumstances change rather than leaving it to drift. If you’ve reached a goal and found the reassurance didn’t last as long as you expected, get in touch and we’re happy to have a no-obligation conversation.