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Finishing a project early and handing it in before it's due might seem like a good idea, but a study claims there's no benefit to doing so.

In fact, researchers say that people don't care if you finish scheduled work before a deadline - but they do care if it's late.

In the research they found that while breaking a promise was costly, exceeding it was not worth the additional effort.

Researchers at the University of California and University of Chicago say breaking promises is more important than working hard and exceeding them (stock image shown). In research they found people were not impressed by overachievers. And they were very annoyed when a promise was not kept to

The study was carried out by Dr Ayelet Gneezy from the University of California at San Diego and Dr Nicholas Epley from the University of Chicago.

They examined people's responses to a promise being broken, kept and exceeded.

And they say this is due to people overvaluing kept promises, which suggests 'a general tendency in social systems to discourage selfishness and reward cooperation,' they write.

In one of several experiments carried out by the researchers they paired up participants and tasked one with solving 40 puzzles.

For each puzzle solved, they would receive a monetary reward.

However the other in the pair, the 'promise-maker', was tasked to offer their help in solving ten of them.

When the promise-maker exceeded their task by solving 15 puzzles, the promise-receivers did not value that much more than when they stuck to the original ten.

However, when help was only offered on five puzzles, the promise-receiver viewed their partner much more negatively.

A similar study, which gave participants better or worse seats to a concert, elicited similar responses.

'Breaking one's promise is costly, but exceeding it does not appear worth the effort,' the researchers conclude.

The study suggests that finishing a project early does not earn you much praise. But failing to stick to a deadline can prove to be much more costly. In one experiment people were not particularly impressed when concert tickets were upgraded, but were annoyed if they were downgraded (stock image shown)