Why Research Says It Is More Productive To Praise People Than Correct Their Mistakes

Embracing failure as a learning tool has become a by word of tech success.

But as virtually every organization becomes tech driven, new research on the economics of behavior suggests a focus on correcting failure is less productive than praise because it reduces the capacity to learn. For optimal outcomes, positive feedback delivers measurably better results. JL


Mark Travers reports in Forbes:

Which form of managerial feedback produces better outcomes? Overwhelmingly, management via encouragement was the more effective method. “Our society celebrates failure as a teachable moment. (But) failure feedback undermines learning because it causes participants to stop processing information. People find failure feedback ego-threatening, which leads them to tune out, and miss the information it offers. Tuning out from a pursuit in the moment of failure could be the first step in a chain reaction that distances and discourages people from the goal they are pursuing.”

Some might say there are two types of bosses. Certain bosses manage people by calling attention to the things they’ve done wrong. This, they believe, is the best way to improve employee performance. Other bosses, preferred by most workers, manage via encouragement – commending employees on the things they’ve done right and never missing an opportunity to offer praise when praise is deserved.

Which is a more effective style of management? New research forthcoming in the journal Psychological Science may have an answer.
A team of researchers led by Lauren Eskreis-Winkler of the University of Chicago designed an experiment to test which form of managerial feedback would produce better outcomes. Overwhelmingly, they found that management via encouragement was the more effective method.
“Our society celebrates failure as a teachable moment,” state Eskreis-Winkler and her team. “Yet we find that failure does the opposite: it undermines learning. Failure feedback undermines learning motivation because it is ego-threatening. It causes participants to tune out and stop processing information.”To arrive at this conclusion, the researchers recruited 422 telemarketers from a call center company in the Midwest to participate in a short online study. In the study, the telemarketers were asked to answer ten trivia questions regarding customer service and customer satisfaction. Each question had two answers. For instance, one question read, “How much money, annually, do U.S. companies lose due to poor customer service?” The answers were: (a) approximately $90 billion or (b) approximately $60 billion.”
The catch was this: participants were randomly assigned to receive either success- or failure-oriented feedback. For participants receiving success-oriented feedback, the message “Your answer was correct” was shown after each correct answer (but no more than four times, total). For participants receiving failure-oriented feedback, the message “Your answer was incorrect” was shown after each incorrect answer (again, no more than four times, total).
The researchers then asked participants to re-answer the four questions
they had been given feedback on, but with one minor alteration. The questions were phrased in the reverse (for example, “Which of the following amounts is NOT the amount that U.S. companies lose annually due to poor customer service?”). The researchers then calculated the percentage of rephrased questions participants’ answered correctly.
They found that telemarketers who were given success-oriented feedback were significantly more likely to respond correctly to the rephrased questions. Specifically, participants given success-oriented feedback answered 62% of the rephrased questions correctly while participants given failure-oriented feedback answered only 48% correctly.
Next, the researchers attempted to uncover the source of the effect. They designed a similar study to the one described above, with one important caveat. They added a scenario in which participants acted as an observer in the learning experience (that is, they were asked to learn from another person’s success- or failure-oriented feedback). Under these conditions, the researchers replicated their previous results (that success feedback prompted greater increases in learning than failure feedback) when participants received feedback themselves. However, when participants observed others receiving feedback and were asked to learn from it, the researchers found that both types of feedback were equally beneficial in promoting learning. The researchers write, “In sum, the more failure is removed from the self, the less people tune out, and the more they learn from it.”
The authors conclude, “Our key result is that people find failure feedback ego-threatening, which leads them to tune out, and miss the information it offers. In other words, failure undermines learning. [...] Tuning out from a pursuit in the moment of failure could be the first step in a chain reaction that distances and discourages people from the goal they are pursuing.”