The Dangers of High Expectations

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Hengchen Dai, Berkeley Dietvorst, Bradford Tuckfield, Katherine Milkman, and Maurice Schweitzer have published a fascinating new study about the dangers of high expectations. Their article is titled, "Quitting When the Going Gets Tough: A Downside of High Performance Expectations."   They note that high expectations can be a very positive force.  For instance, when teachers set high expectations for students, they often achieve good academic results.   Why?  Research suggests that high external performance expectations elevates self-expectations.   

However, the scholars examine what occurs when someone with high external performance expectations hits a roadblock or obstacle early on during a particular effort. they argue the following: "We propose that when initial performance is poor, compared to individuals who face low expectations, individuals who face 6 high expectations will be more concerned about their public image and experience greater embarrassment."  How do individuals cope with this embarrassment?  For some people, persistence may be the right strategy.  They persevere so as to eventually succeed and thus avoid the embarrassment of not meeting external expectations.  For many individuals, though, an opposite reaction occurs. They begin searching for an exit strategy so as to avoid the embarrassment of unfulfilled expectations.  In particular, they hope to find an exit strategy with a "plausibly valid excuse" for quitting, thus enabling them to blame the initial poor performance on unforeseen or uncontrollable circumstances.  

To test their hypothesis about exit strategies, they conducted a study of over 300,000 men's tennis matches.   They showed that, "After losing the first set of a match, players who are expected to win (favorites) are significantly more likely to quit than players who are expected to lose (underdogs)."  A subsequent experimental study confirmed these results.  

What then should we do? Should we lower performance expectations for talented individuals on our teams? Of course not. What we must do, though, is be ready to coach, support, and encourage those who might encounter early setbacks.  Leaders need to focus on how one can learn from an initial failure, rather than seeking to assign blame.   They cultivate a growth mindset among their team members.  

Can You Have Too Much Grit?

Amy Morin writes in Forbes this week about an interesting new study about grit. The study, is titled "When the going gets tough: Grit predicts costly perseverance." The authors are Gale Lucas, Jonathan Gratch, Lin Cheng, and Stacy Marsella.  Note that a lengthy stream of research over the past decade or so has extolled the benefits of grit.  What is grit? University of Pennsylvania Professor Angela Duckworth defines grit as "perseverance and passion for long-term goals." Duckworth has studied grit extensively in her academic career. She has found that intelligence is not always a good predictor of academic or professional success. Grit matters. For instance, she has found that, at West Point, a cadet's grit score is the best predictor of success in "Beast Barracks" – the incredibly challenging, six week summer training regimen that all new cadets must endure. Grit predicted success more so than intelligence, leadership ability or physical fitness.

The new study by Lucas and her colleagues examines whether grit may come with some negative consequences.  Could it be possible for someone to exhibit "too much" grit in some circumstances, leading to poor results?  In a series of studies, Lucas and her colleagues had subjects tackle very challenging tasks.  What did they find? 

Across three studies, we found that higher grit individuals invest more effort and persist in tasks that are not going well. Grittier participants were less willing to give up when failing even though they were likely to incur a cost for their persistence. In Study 1, grittier participants were able to complete fewer problems in an anagram task where some of the items should have been passed over (i.e., unsolvable items). This provides initial evidence that they persisted at a cost to themselves, in this case the cost of getting to attempt more problems. Because we incentivized performance (with entries into a lottery for $100), it seems that grittier participants were specifically trading off greater chances at monetary gains to persist at the more difficult questions. Compared to participants with lower grit, grittier participants not only increase effort when they are losing a game (Study 2), but also are more likely to stay and keep fighting a losing battle when they could quit (Study 3).