You don't copy the click. You catch the goal.

There’s a quiet difference between two things your product can show a new user. It can show them a number — 12,400 builders joined this week. Or it can show them a person in motion — Maya just shipped her third project. The first is social proof, and it answers a safety question: is this a reasonable thing to be doing? The second does something stranger. Watch someone pursue a goal and, without ever deciding to, you can end up wanting the same thing.

Psychologists call it goal contagion. In work by Aarts, Gollwitzer, and Hassin, people who simply read about someone pursuing a goal — sometimes tucked inside an unrelated passage — were measurably more likely to pursue that same goal themselves a few minutes later, often with no idea why. The important word is goal, not behavior. You’re not mimicking the click. Your brain quietly infers the end-state the other person is chasing and tries it on as its own.

That’s why it isn’t the same as copying, and isn’t the same as social proof. Mimicry copies the motion. Social proof copies the judgment — lots of people do this, so it’s probably fine. Goal contagion copies the wanting. It plants a destination in someone who didn’t walk in with one.

And — this is the part that keeps it from being a cheap trick — the catching has a filter. In the same research, when the modeled pursuit looked illegitimate, when the person chased the goal in a way that read as selfish or underhanded, the contagion weakened or didn’t happen at all. People don’t catch a goal they’d be a little ashamed to hold. So the mechanism isn’t “show any striving and motivation spreads.” It’s closer to: show striving a watcher could picture being proud of, and the goal travels.

Here’s where it lands for anyone building. Most “activity” surfaces are built like scoreboards — counts, totals, leaderboards. Those lean on social proof, and social proof is real. But if the thing you actually want is for a hesitant user to want what your best users want — to ship, to publish, to finish — then a number is the wrong instrument. A number says many. A visible act of pursuit says here is what you could be doing, and here is someone like you doing it.

So the design move is specific. When you surface other people’s behavior, surface the pursuit — not just the outcome, not just the count. Someone published a first draft. A new builder just connected their repo. Make the goal legible inside the activity, frame it as ordinary and reachable, and — the easy part to forget — make sure the striving on display is one your user would be glad to be caught doing, because the filter is always watching.

There’s an obvious way to abuse this, which is to manufacture pursuit that isn’t happening. Fake activity doesn’t just risk the trust cost; it fails on its own terms, because the goal people catch from a fabricated striver is “perform busyness” — which is not a goal worth transmitting. The honest version is both the better one and the one that works.

The scoreboard tells a user they’re not alone, and that’s worth something. But alone-or-not is a safety question, and safety isn’t the same as desire. If you want to move desire, stop counting the crowd and show one person, mid-reach, doing the thing — in a way your user wouldn’t mind being seen doing themselves.