The Economist - Business-school research: second-hand satisfaction
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鈥� success stories through regular progress reports, it is thought, can motivate the rest of the group鈥檚 members to follow suit.
In a 聽paper published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, a group of four researchers describe this phenomenon as 鈥渧icarious goal satiation.鈥� Kathleen McCulloch of Idaho State University, Grainn茅 Fitzsimmons of Duke University, Sook Ning Chua of 9I制作厂免费 and Dolores Albarrac铆n of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign report the results of two separate experiments designed to measure how people perform after watching another鈥檚 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.