The reason a completion figure appears before you opt in

You open an app for the first time and, before you have agreed to sign up or entered a single detail, the screen already reads “Profile 40% complete.” You did nothing to earn that forty percent — it was assigned to you at the door — yet leaving now feels like abandoning progress rather than declining to start.

What everyone sees

A pre-filled completion figure looks like a harmless nudge or a friendly welcome — a way to show the setup is nearly done. It is a way to manufacture momentum before consent has been given. By assigning progress the user never made, the screen converts the decision from “should I start this?” into “should I abandon something already underway?” — and the second question is far harder to answer with a no.

What is actually happening

Nunes and Drèze’s endowed progress effect showed that granting people unearned progress toward a goal makes them more likely to pursue it to completion, because a task framed as begun is one people are reluctant to abandon. Johnson and Goldstein’s work on defaults demonstrated that the way a choice is pre-set powerfully shapes what people do, because departing from a default requires an active decision most will not make. A completion figure shown before opt-in combines both: it endows progress that was never made and sets “in progress” as the default state, so declining now means both abandoning a started task and overriding a default — two forces pushing toward continuing.

Why it stays hidden

The device hides because the figure is presented as information about the setup rather than as a manipulation of the decision. The user reads “40% complete” as a fact and feels the pull to finish without noticing that the starting point was assigned precisely to create that pull. Because there was never a moment where they consciously chose to begin, they cannot see that the sense of being underway — and the reluctance to abandon it — was installed before they agreed to anything.