Seeing someone else achieve a goal may make you less likely to achieve your own
WHETHER attending a weight-loss meeting, weaning yourself off the sauce at Alcoholics Anonymous, or setting up a business team, we are used to the idea that working towards a common goal is best done in a group. Hearing about others’ success stories through regular progress reports, it is thought, can motivate the rest of the group’s members to follow suit.
Social psychologists often describe goals as “contagious”. But another line of research shows that people quickly lose interest once they have completed a task. (Think of studying for an important exam, and then forgetting the crammed material quickly.) So what if the satisfaction of achieving a goal is also contagious? Hearing your friends or colleagues relate their triumphs with bashful smiles might produce a warm feeling of pride in your own breast—so much so, in fact, that you no longer feel the need to accomplish your own task.
In a paper published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, a group of four researchers describe this phenomenon as “vicarious goal satiation.” Kathleen McCulloch of Idaho State University, Grainné Fitzsimmons of Duke University, Sook Ning Chua of McGill University and Dolores Albarracín of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign report the results of two separate experiments designed to measure how people perform after watching another’s success. In one, participants watched a pair of disembodied hands either succeed or fail at making anagrams of words, while being asked to pick out coloured objects onscreen. In the other, participants first read a story in which an anxious employee went looking for his manager, then had to attempted a word-completion task. In both cases, the authors believed that those who saw the disembodied hands succeed (and give a thumbs-up sign, to make things perfectly clear) or read about the employee finding his manager, would do worse who witnessed a failure. And in both cases, they were right.
Ms McCulloch readily admits that the experiments are artificial. But if people can be less motivated from watching a pair of hands, might it be that the effect is even stronger when observing friends or co-workers? One previous study, she notes, found that people watching a game show derived more satisfaction from winners who were more like themselves.
Moreover, the more committed an actor is to a goal, the more likely it is that the observer will “catch” the goal—and relax when progress is achieved. This might help explain why small teams frequently have one highly motivated member who works hard while the rest coast along. The lesser performers might be free-riding; but they might be well-intentioned and vicariously satisfied by the high achiever’s progress.
Ms Fitzsimmons has focused more on the management implications. Just talking about progress towards goals might be enough to trigger vicarious goal satiation, she says, allowing everyone to leave the meeting with a warm glow and a subsequent lack of ambition. Reminding people of tasks yet to be completed, not just progress reports, may buck their ideas up. Another possible solution is to give feedback individually, rather than in a group, to keep employees from happily, if subconsciously, feeding off each other’s accomplishments.
