In 2011 the UK’s Chief Medical Officer, Professor Dame Sally Davies, made a startling claim that generated headlines around the world. We are losing the war against infections as a result of growing antimicrobial resistance, she said, claiming that the threat was so grave it should be included alongside terrorism, civil emergencies and cyber-attacks on the UK’s national security risk register.1 Antimicrobial resistance occurs when microorganisms, such as bacteria, change in ways that render the medications used to cure infections ineffective. Professor Davies explained that in the last fifty years, we’ve developed vaccines and drugs that have kept these infections largely at bay. But the picture has started to change as resistance to these medications has increased. So the next fifty years could be different if we don’t start acting fast. Disease and infections that were previously easy to control will become threats to human health; standard surgical procedures and treatments, like hip replacements, chemotherapy and organ transplants, which rely on our ability to treat infections, will suddenly become much riskier. Like many complex problems, antimicrobial resistance can’t be solved overnight. We will need to develop new drugs and medical procedures, and these will take years to develop. But antimicrobial resistance isn’t just about the drugs. It’s about human behaviour. Whenever we fail to finish a course of prescribed treatment, or put pressure on a doctor to give us drugs we don’t need, we’re helping to create more resistant microorganisms.
Knowing that any solutions would need to focus as much on behaviour as medicine got the Behavioural Insights Team’s director of health, Michael Hallsworth, thinking. Michael, together with teams from the Department of Health and Public Health England, wanted to know if doctors would be just as receptive as the rest of the population to being given good feedback. They started by collating the information about what GP practices across England were doing, and used this to identify practices whose prescription rate for antibiotics was in the top 20 per cent for their local area. Half of this group of over-prescribers were then sent a letter, signed by the Chief Medical Officer, with feedback about their prescription habits, together with three specific things they could immediately do to reduce the number of prescriptions they gave out. For example, doctors can give patients delayed prescriptions, which enable them to get their medication in the future, so long as their symptoms persist. Alongside these tips, the doctors were told how their performance compared with others. They were informed that ‘the great majority (80 per cent) of practices in [your local area] prescribe fewer antibiotics per head than yours’. When Michael and his team compared the subsequent behaviour of those doctors who received the feedback letters to that of those who got no such letter, they were surprised by the impact. Over a six-month period, GP practices receiving the feedback letters prescribed an estimated 73,400 fewer antibiotic items than those that didn’t.2 Just think about this for a moment: no changes were made to the potency of the drugs, or the financial incentives acting upon the doctors. They weren’t bombarded with calls from central government haranguing them. They were just given feedback about what they were already doing, given some practical advice about what could be done differently, and told how they compared to others. They responded by prescribing tens of thousands fewer prescriptions than before.
Feedback has long been recognized as a profoundly effective tool for changing behaviour and helping us achieve our goals and the reason for this is pretty straightforward. It is very difficult for us to progress towards a goal if we don’t know how well we are doing in relation to it. But, as we will see, good feedback is more than just knowing where you currently stand. It’s about understanding what actions you can take to do even better. It’s also about recognizing what is possible by understanding how others are doing in relation to you. We often fail, though, to collect and use feedback systematically. So this chapter will set out a simple framework for effective feedback that should spur your or others’ motivation. The three golden rules of feedback are:
Know where you stand in relation to your goal. You need to be able to draw on information that shows where you are in relation to your goal.
Make it timely, specific, actionable and focused on effort. Ideally, you want feedback that is personal to you, clear about what you need to keep doing or do differently and given as close to event as possible.
Compare your performance with others. If you can, you should also find out how well you are doing in comparison with others. In some situations, this can be the most powerful feedback of all.
Rule 1: Know where you stand in relation to your goal
If you’ve ever played the childhood game ‘hot or cold’, you’ll know all about how useful feedback can be. In the game, a treasure is hidden somewhere and your task is to find it – the only information you have is whether you’re getting closer or further away from the prize: ‘You’re cold, still cold, colder, getting warmer, warmer, warmer, very warm, hot, VERY HOT!’ Eventually, you’re so hot that you find the treasure. And you find it because you’re continually being guided by another individual who is letting you know where you stand in relation to the ultimate objective.
In adult life, there are some situations that resemble the kind of feedback you receive when you’re playing hot or cold. Think about the first time you learnt to drive a car. If it was anything like most people’s experiences, it would have been a very stop/start experience. Putting your foot on the accelerator is, at first, a terrifying experience. You probably pushed too hard and over-revved the engine (‘cold’), or didn’t push hard enough (‘colder’), before starting to get the balance right (‘getting hotter’). When you pressed on the brakes for the first time, you probably caused the vehicle to jerk to a halt (‘cold’). But over time, you started to learn the right level of pressure (‘warmer’), and how much you needed to turn the wheel in order to turn a corner smoothly (‘hot’). All of this was helped by the fact that, every time you used the brakes, pedals and wheel, you got an instant response. The car moved (or didn’t) in the direction you desired (or not). This feedback enabled you to learn how to apply pressure in the right way to give you the result you wanted. This illustrates an important principle about good feedback – feedback isn’t just information. It’s about knowing where things are in relation to where they should be.
Lots of studies have shown just how effective feedback, focused on where you are in relation to where you should be, can be. Evidence from consumer markets shows that feedback from other purchasers (in the style of TripAdvisor, eBay and Yelp) can transform marketplaces and drive business to the best-value or highest-quality providers. An extra star on Yelp’s 5-star customer rating scale, for example, increases a restaurant’s revenue by 5 to 9 per cent in the following year.3 Research on individuals striving to achieve a personal goal shows similarly powerful effects. Some of the earliest of these studies were conducted by Albert Bandura, one of the most renowned living psychologists. In one of our favourite examples, Bandura and his colleague Daniel Cervone took a group of students, and got them to do some strenuous activity on an exercise bike.4 All the students were split into different groups. After they had completed the first round of exercise, some of them were set a challenging goal, but would receive no feedback along the way. Their goal was to increase their effort next time round by 40 per cent, and they received a reminder of this objective after they’d been exercising for five minutes. The second group were given feedback. Their performance was compared to how well they had done during the previous session. However, they were set no goals. Finally, the third group got both the goal (increase your effort by 40 per cent) as well as feedback along the way.5 In other words, only this final group were given feedback that told them how they were performing in relation to the goal they were trying to achieve. And the results showed just how effective this combination was. Everyone improved their performance. But the students who received feedback that enabled them to understand where they were in relation to a clear goal more than doubled their performance over and above those who had received just goals or just feedback. In other words, information alone is not enough. Using feedback effectively involves taking information about how well you’re doing, and then relating this to what it is you are trying to achieve – your goal.
The problem is that, in most areas of life, we don’t get feedback of this kind. We charge ahead with our personal and work projects but don’t get a chance to step back and think about the progress we’re making towards the goals we set ourselves. And this is because most of the things we set out to achieve aren’t set up like a driving lesson, in which you get an instant understanding of the relationship between your actions and their consequences. At the Behavioural Insights Team, we’ve found that feedback is often lacking in some of the areas where we might imagine it to be most important. When Elspeth Kirkman, who now heads our office in New York, looked at how social worker decisions might be improved, one thing in particular stood out. Social workers had no means of understanding what happened as a long-term consequence of their decisions. They got no feedback. So one of Elspeth’s main recommendations was to introduce feedback loops that enabled social workers and local authorities to track the consequences of their decisions. This would – over time – enable them to build up a picture of which types of decisions, in which kinds of circumstances, are most likely to result in positive outcomes for children.
Social worker decision making might seem a world away from the goals you have set yourself, but the principles are the same. When you are considering your goals, you should seek out information that enables you to understand where you are in relation to where you want to get to. If you are seeking to lose weight and have followed the advice of earlier chapters, you will have set yourself a long-term goal and decided on the steps you need to take to get there. Getting feedback is as simple as understanding how much you weigh at each point along the way, so that you can see how you are progressing in relation to that goal. Or, if you are seeking to run the marathon in a certain time, and have broken your goal down into discrete steps, you will want to know as you progress how you are doing in relation to these steps. This could be how fast you are now able to run 10 km, or how good you are at undertaking the elements of your new training regime, such as the speed of your hill runs or the amount of weight you can lift in the gym. You will find that new apps and technologies will make the process of getting good feedback far simpler. The running app Strava, for example, not only enables you to track how fast your total run has been, but also breaks it down into different segments, each of which is given a separate time. This allows you to track your performance over time, and to compare how well you have done against others (see the third rule in this chapter).
Feedback doesn’t just show us where we are going wrong, then; it enables us to understand better the impact and the progress we are making in relation to our ultimate goals. And as human beings, this is important. We like to feel that we are making progress, so it can sometimes help to set up our feedback systems in a way that maximizes this sensation. One study that illustrates this principle nicely was led by Ran Kivetz, who wanted to know what kinds of loyalty cards in cafes would encourage people to purchase more coffee. Would it be a card for which you needed to collect ten stamps to get your free coffee? Or would it be a card that required you to collect twelve stamps, the first two of which were pre-stamped ‘bonuses’. Note that both the cards require you to do exactly the same thing: get ten stamps. But the second makes it feel as though you’ve already started making progress towards the goal of that free cup of coffee, and it was this card that significantly outperformed the other.6
This feeling of making progress is particularly important when the link between apparently mundane tasks you have to complete and your ultimate goal feel less direct. For example, in our work with job centres, we created a job search task list, which job seekers used to tick off once they had completed a task. We frontloaded this with a number of easier tasks at the beginning, such as filling out forms, attending meetings and registering for job updates, so that jobseekers would have a sense of progress and be more motivated to take on the more challenging tasks of completing CVs, attending job interviews and even retraining. In other words, knowing where you stand in relation to your goal is important. But there are ways of helping you feel that this goal is less distant than it might otherwise appear to be.
The lesson at the heart of this golden rule is to know where you stand in relation to your goal. Whether it’s how much weight you’ve lost, how your marathon training is going, or where you and your team at work stand in relation to performance objectives for the year, it’s very difficult for us to progress towards a goal if we don’t know where we are on the path to achieving it. Once we’ve ascertained this, we can start turning to the question of what the best ways of giving and receiving feedback might be. This important question, which focuses on the specific details that matter most to spur our efforts, is the subject of the next section.
Rule 2: Make it timely, specific, actionable and focused on the effort
In 2003 Dan Candelaria and his fellow traffic engineers in Garden Grove, California, set out to tackle a familiar problem – drivers speeding through school zones.7 Dan had tried a number of different approaches, from brighter speed limit signs to increasing the number of fines given out. But these enjoyed only modest success and the number of cyclists and pedestrians being hit in these zones remained stubbornly high. So they decided to try something new – to give drivers feedback about how fast they were driving as they drove past. They erected a radar sensor attached to a large digital ‘Your Speed’ sign that provided real-time information on each driver’s speed. However, unlike traditional speed cameras and fines, this sign came with no financial or legal penalties. Dan was betting on the power of feedback, and challenging decades of accepted wisdom that there needed to be a stick to encourage people to comply. He had a hunch that by simply telling drivers how fast they were driving – information that was already available on their dashboard – they would slow down. And he was right.
In the years since the Garden Grove project began, developments in radar technology have meant that the cost of these signs has dropped steadily in price, and consequently ‘Your Speed’ signs have proliferated on roads across the globe.8 Despite their ubiquity, the signs have consistently proven to reduce speeds, up to 10 per cent on average, an effect that seems to be well targeted at those speeding and which often lasts for several miles down the road. In fact, most traffic engineers and safety experts now consider these signs to be more effective at changing driving habits than deploying police officers with radar guns to issue tickets.9 So, despite the lack of a penalty or indeed any new information, this deceptively simple, targeted piece of feedback has successfully reduced road traffic deaths around the world.
The speeding signs nicely illustrate three of the core principles of good feedback. It’s no good telling someone that they’re a bad driver, five months after their Californian speeding session. It’s much better to be able to give them feedback as close to the event as possible, so that they can react to it quickly. The signs do this very nicely – by giving real-time information. Similarly, the signs give specific information that is personal to each driver. They don’t average out the speed of cars in the area, or tell you that you are generally going too fast. If you’re speeding, they tell you by how much. This relates to the third, and possibly the most important lesson in good feedback; it needs to be actionable. The clear message of the signs is to do something that you can actually act upon in the moment.
Good feedback, then, is all about giving people the tools to do things differently (or to keep on doing things that they are doing well). If you’re thinking that this sounds all well and good for something like speeding, where you can measure what’s happening very easily in real time, it’s worth knowing that these same lessons are being adopted in all kinds of complex areas. The Education Endowment Foundation, for example, has identified that giving pupils timely, specific, actionable feedback is potentially one of the most important and cost-effective changes that can be made to improve children’s educational outcomes.10 At its most basic, this can mean explaining just after a pupil has performed well that ‘It was good because you…’ rather than simply saying ‘correct’. And it should provide specific guidance on how to improve, not just telling pupils that they are wrong. In the Education Endowment Foundation’s many studies of best practice in education, they have found that good feedback is one of the most effective practices one can introduce into a school. It helps pupils to progress by the equivalent of eight months of learning. This is much more effective than lots of other things that are more standard practice, like homework (equivalent progress: five months in secondary school, one month in primary) and extending the school day (two months). It’s cheap too: introducing good feedback, when you factor in the training time and the costs of cover teachers, is less than £100 a pupil.
If these three principles sound obvious – that feedback should be timely, specific and actionable – then think about how infrequently they are actually acted on in the real world. Most organizations around the world still rely on giving feedback once a year during the annual performance review. But as anyone who’s been through a performance review at the end of the year knows, very often the feedback is out of date by the time it’s received; it’s not specific enough (how can it be, when it covers an entire year of things you have done?); and that makes it harder for anyone to think about what they might do as a result. For this reason, companies around the world are abandoning the traditional way of conducting year-end performance reviews. The consulting firm Accenture, which employs over 300,000 people around the world, has recently halted annual performance reviews, and replaced them with feedback sessions that encourage shorter, sharper reflections at the end of a project.11 At the Behavioural Insights Team we haven’t abandoned end-of-year reviews altogether, but we have developed an in-house online feedback system that at the end of every project encourages everyone to give timely feedback to those they’ve been working with, the focus being on what people should continue doing (or could do differently).
There is one other strand of behavioural science research that holds lessons for how to give and receive good feedback. To understand it, we have to go back to the classroom with two researchers, Claudia Mueller and Carol Dweck, who were then based at Columbia University. They noticed that it seemed to be received wisdom that, if someone does a good job in the classroom, on the sports field or in any other walk of life, the right thing to do is to praise that person for their innate intelligence or their abilities. If a child gets a high score in a test or draws an especially good picture, for example, telling them how clever they are seems like the most natural thing in the world. But Mueller and Dweck were worried that praising someone for their raw intelligence might have some negative side effects. If you were led to believe that you had an innate talent for maths, what happens if you flunk your next test? Might not that make you question your abilities and would it not result in you failing to challenge yourself to undertake tasks that might risk exposing your deficiencies?
Dweck and Mueller were worried, and so they set about finding answers to some of these questions. They conducted a study on schoolchildren, who were given a set of problems to solve under a tight time limit.12 What the children didn’t know was that the researchers were going to vary the kind of feedback they were given, regardless of the scores they actually achieved for each of the three sets of tasks. In the first task, all the children were told they’d done well (they were told they’d got at least 80 per cent correct), and then were given different kinds of feedback that offered an explanation for their success. Some of the children were praised for their ability (‘You must be smart at these problems’), whereas other children were praised for the effort they put in (‘You must have worked hard at these problems’). The children were then set another, more difficult set of tasks, at which they were told they’d performed poorly (they were told they had got no more than 50 per cent correct). This second set of tasks, however, wasn’t the real subject of the study. What the researchers were really interested in was how the two different sets of children would respond when they had a third challenge to overcome. Would those who’d been praised for their innate abilities, but then had a setback, perform less well than those who’d been told that they succeeded in the first challenge because they tried hard?
The answer was an emphatic yes. When children were given feedback on the first task based on their innate intelligence, and then experienced failure in the second task, their performance in the third task nose-dived. They managed to get fewer correct scores than they’d done in the first task, despite the fact that they were more familiar with these types of tasks. But the performance of those who were praised for their effort improved markedly. They were more likely to persist with the problems and more likely to choose future tasks that enabled them to learn, rather than ‘problems that I’m pretty good at, so I can show I’m clever’. It seemed that children praised for their intelligence appeared to learn that their performance reflected their abilities, so they attributed their subsequent poor performance to a low ability. Whereas those praised for hard work didn’t ascribe their performance to their raw abilities in the same way. They responded by working harder at the subsequent task, because they had come to learn that hard graft is the way to succeed.13
Since these original, groundbreaking studies, Dweck has gone on to look at the application of this same set of principles to lots of different areas, almost all of which can be used to help us achieve our goals. She explains the principle by describing two different kinds of ‘mindsets’. One is the ‘fixed mindset’, which is a belief that our qualities are set in stone, and results in us continually needing to prove ourselves over and over. When the children in the original studies were praised for their raw intelligence, they were being encouraged to think with a fixed mindset. The other mindset, encouraged in those who were given praise based on their effort, is the ‘growth mindset’, and it is founded on the belief that your basic qualities are things you can cultivate through your efforts.14 Dweck’s enlightening observation is that, although people do obviously differ in their abilities, ‘everyone can change and grow through application and experience’. If you can give praise for effort and persistence, rather than simply for innate talent, you’re more likely to be able to help yourself – and anyone you’re working with – to reach their goals.
So it seems that good feedback isn’t just about knowing where you stand in relation to your goal. We’ve seen that when the feedback given is important; the closer to the event the better. We’ve also seen that feedback that is specific and actionable is critical – you need to be able to do something as a result of the feedback (even if this is to keep doing what you’re already doing). And finally, it’s clear that simply praising people for being inherently good at something isn’t as effective as encouraging effort and persistence with a task.
Rule 3: Compare your performance to others
We saw in Chapter 2 how planning prompts can be used to increase voter turnout. Given that relatively small shifts in voter turnout can effect the outcome of an election, it is not surprising that this has been the subject of significant research and that other tools have also proved effective – most notably comparative feedback before and after election day.
One study in particular took place back in August 2006 and focused on some 180,000 households, grouped by their location, in the run-up to the primary elections in the state of Michigan, USA.15 Elections are good sources of experimental evidence in the US because voter records (whether someone votes, not who they vote for) are made public, which makes it easy to see what happens when you do something – like writing to would-be voters using increasingly strong forms of social pressure. In the study, some of the letters urged voters to get to the polls out of civic duty. These letters included the words ‘DO YOUR CIVIC DUTY – VOTE!’ The next group had the social pressure ratcheted up. In these letters, the voting records of members of the household were listed. If the person had voted in the 2004 primary and general election, the word ‘voted’ appeared next to their name. It was blank if they hadn’t. If that wasn’t enough, the letter promised the recipients that the list would be updated and sent round again after the election. Now, you might think this was more than sufficient mischievous activity for one band of researchers. But they decided to raise the stakes still further in the final group’s letters. As for the previous group, they listed the voting records of everyone in the household. But they also listed the voting records of their neighbours. This group too were told that the tables would be updated after the election. Members of the household, in other words, would know their neighbours’ voting record, but their neighbours would also know theirs.16
The results uncovered one of the most effective ways ever devised of getting people out to vote. The researchers themselves described the results as startling. Sending someone a letter urging them to vote out of civic duty did have a small, positive effect. But this was very small by comparison with the dramatic increase occasioned by reminding households of their own voting records. In this group, turnout leapt by 16 per cent. The biggest gain of all, though, came when one’s voting record was set alongside one’s neighbour’s. For this group, there was a remarkable increase of over 27 per cent17 – an increase that is almost unprecedented for any kind of campaign that doesn’t involve going round face to face to get people to the booths.
We care a lot about how others perceive us and how we compare to others, and we are heavily influenced by what those around us do and say. This relates to what behavioural scientists call ‘social norms’. Social norms are the values, actions and expectations of a particular society or group, and they offer guides to our behaviour. Study after study has shown that making people aware of what most other people are doing – known as ‘descriptive social norms’ – can help to reinforce underlying motivations.18 There’s a good reason for this. Not only are we heavily influenced by others’ behaviour; we are also often unaware of what people are really doing, and are prone to underestimate the good behaviour of others.19 We tend to think that people are much more likely to be avoiding tax, consuming vast amounts of fatty food and doing next to no exercise than is really the case. And this creates an opportunity: by understanding and communicating what the prevailing social norm is, we can help motivate ourselves and others.
The Behavioural Insights Team has been using this in lots of different ways to encourage people to change their behaviour. The GPs in the opening example were one such case. Doctors, not uniquely among groups of professionals, don’t simply care about what they are doing independently of others. They care also about how they are regarded by their peers, and whether they are in line with the prevailing social norms.
Perhaps our most famous example of this principle in action involved encouraging people to pay their tax. Tens of thousands of late taxpayers were sent letters with variants of these descriptive social norm messages. We found that messages simply telling people that ‘Nine out of ten people pay their tax on time’ were very effective at getting more people to pay the tax they owed, helping them to avoid being taken to court. But we also found that the more specific was the descriptive norm, the more effective it tended to be. When we told people that ‘The vast majority of people in your local area pay their tax on time’, it worked even better than the more generic message. Yet even this wasn’t as effective as the message which read: ‘Most people with a tax debt like yours have paid by now.’ These small changes to tax letters were part of a wider programme of interventions that helped to bring forward over £200 million in revenue to Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC, the UK’s tax authority) and helped spur the creation of a tax-specific Behavioural and Customer Insights Team inside HMRC, which is dedicated to continuing this programme of work.
We are not suggesting, of course, that you get someone to write you a letter comparing your performance with those of others in your local area, as you progress towards hitting your target. But the good news is that, over the last few years, there’s been an explosion in the number of apps and websites that enable you to do exactly the same thing, and many of these new tools have got comparative feedback information at the heart of them, enabling you to compare how you’re doing in relation to other people. One of the best examples of this is the Fitbit, which is a wearable device that measures how much exercise you’ve done. The Fitbit app enables you to easily compare your performance against your friends, and to create challenges in which you compete against each other. For example, when Owain was in Singapore with Sam Hanes, who heads the Behavioural Insights Team’s Singaporean office, Sam challenged him to a step challenge. Over the course of the week, they’d see who could walk the highest number of steps. It was ultimately Sam who prevailed, but they both ended up walking a bit more than they would have done in the absence of the competition.
This competitive aspect of such apps got Karen Tindall from our Australia office thinking about whether comparative feedback would be just as effective at a group level as it is at individual level. So we conducted a large study with the charity Movember, in which employees of the company Lendlease were offered subsidised Fitbits to motivate them to increase their levels of physical activity and measure their daily step counts. In total, fifty teams (made up of 646 individuals) were randomly assigned to receive one of two types of feedback. The first group got generic leaderboard information that told them which teams were in the lead. But the second group also got team performance information, which told them what their current rank was as a team, how far they were from the lead team and who the most active individuals in the team were. The more specific group feedback, which showed how well they were doing in relation to other teams, helped to spur on their performance and, amazingly, had a particularly big impact on those who were previously the least active – precisely the people who needed the most help.
You can even use this same idea at the level of an entire organization. Imagine, for a second, that you’re the head of a big government department in the UK. It’s 2010 and you’re responsible for thousands of members of staff, and under a lot of pressure to deliver the objectives of the government of the day. Imagine that you’ve got all this to worry about and then you hear that the prime minister has just announced that all departments are expected to cut their carbon emissions by at least 10 per cent. How do you feel? There is a chance that, if you’re focused on reforming the health service or thinking about the UK’s foreign policy objectives, this is not going to be at the top of your list of priorities for the next month. But now imagine that all departments will have their energy emissions performance ranked alongside other each other, and that the data will be shared at the weekly meeting of heads of department in the form of a league table. If you’re at the Department for Health, you’ll suddenly be able to see if you’re performing worse or better than your colleagues. How do you now feel? What does that do to your behaviour? This was a plan we helped to put together back in 2010 and by 2011, departmental carbon emissions had plummeted across the board. Every department achieved the 10 per cent reduction and some (like the Department for Energy and Climate Change) vastly exceeded the target.
So comparative feedback seems to work well in all kinds of situations. But before we all charge off telling everyone how they are performing relative to everyone else, we should be aware of a very important caveat, which can result in it backfiring. It is easy inadvertently to reinforce a negative social norm by emphasizing the prevalence of an undesirable behaviour. In their well-intentioned desire to highlight important issues, authorities can sometimes communicate that everyone’s getting up to whatever it is that they’d prefer you didn’t do. Think of signs in GP surgeries that urge you not to miss your appointment because so many other people are now failing to turn up. By signalling to people that ‘everyone is doing it’, you can inadvertently encourage more people to do the very thing you are trying to prevent.20 So if you and your peers are failing to exercise more, failing to quit smoking or failing to lose weight, it’s best not to invoke these kinds of ‘descriptive social norms’ by telling people that everyone is failing. Thankfully, there are a couple of things you can do to mitigate these effects. The first is to consider who the message is aimed at. Remember, for example, that in the doctors study, we targeted only those who prescribed the most, not those who prescribed the least. This enabled us always to be able to say that others were doing better in comparison to them. The second thing, which is especially useful for those who are already high performers, is to supplement comparative information with an overall assessment of how well someone is doing (what behavioural scientists call the ‘injunctive norm’). Telling a high performer that they are doing well and should keep it up can help to avoid negative results.
What all of these examples of comparative feedback show is that people don’t just care about their absolute level of performance. All of us care just as much – and sometimes more – about how well we are doing relative to other people. At the highest levels, this makes a lot of sense. Olympic sprinters don’t just care about how quickly they can cover 100 metres. They care whether they’re faster or slower than the other people they’re racing against and the colour of their medal. In fact, one study of athletes’ reactions to winning silver and bronze medals at the Olympics argued that those who ranked second were less happy since they tended to associate this with the ‘near-miss’ of a gold medal, while the bronze medallists were more likely to be relieved to be on the podium at all.21 But in all walks of life, this same phenomenon holds true. We don’t just care what our salary is. We care if it’s more or less than someone else doing a comparable role. And when we’re trying to achieve a tricky goal, we don’t just care about how good we are at doing it, we care and are motivated by whether others are better or worse at doing the same thing. So we’d urge you to use comparative information to help you improve. If you do, it can help you reach your target more quickly.
Feedback is an essential element towards goal achievement. But as we’ve seen, in some of the most critical areas of work and play, we fail to put in place mechanisms that enable us to see where we stand in relation to where we want to reach. With the growth of new technologies, there has never been a better moment to start thinking about how you can get good feedback. Banking and retail apps allow you to monitor and break down your expenditure in ways that would have been impossible for all but the most committed accountants in the past. Energy meters enable you to track your usage as never before. Fitness trackers allow you to monitor your exercise levels down to the exact number of steps. In the workplace, companies are devising new methods of enabling employees to be given feedback more frequently throughout the year (rather than just at the end of year in the dreaded performance appraisal). But in taking advantage of these new devices, you should remember that information alone isn’t going to help you that much. First, you need to be able to understand where you are in relation to where you’re heading. Second, you need to understand what it is that you can do to improve your performance next time round. This is why feedback that is specific, personal, actionable and focuses on effort over innate talent is so helpful; it allows you to understand what you can do with the information you’re given. Finally, we’ve seen that, while it’s amazing to get all this information about yourself, if you’re able to compare how well you’re doing in relation to other people, you’ll probably achieve your goal even more quickly.