The Case for Praise

(And why it is withheld)

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Early in my teaching career, I severely underestimated the extent to which learning is driven by positive feedback.

I knew, of course, that compliments make people feel good (an intrinsic value in its own right) and that praise can be instrumentally useful as a source of motivation. But I didn’t have a fully formed theory of the mechanisms that make positive feedback an essential tool for personal growth.

This post is my attempt to shine a light on the inner life of three such mechanisms.

1. Praise can often achieve the same end more effectively.

Consider a simple example of a desired behavior change: Your friend is always bailing on plans at the last minute.

The first intervention that comes to mind for most of us is to call the friend out on their flakiness—and this certainly may achieve your desired goal, at least in the short-run. However, it’s likely to be a somewhat awkward interaction, and if your friend happens to bail again, you can quickly enter a downward spiral of resentment (by you) and avoidance (by your friend).

Another option, which is likely to yield better results if repeated over time, is to praise what is sometimes called the “positive opposite” behavior: The next time your friend does show up as they’d said they would, take the opportunity to emphasize how great it is to spend time with them, how nice to know you can count on them, et cetera. Often a simple “Thanks for X! I really appreciate it” can serve this function of acknowledgment.

Some people worry that it’s manipulative to praise someone’s dependability what you’re really after is reducing their flakiness; I think that view is short-sighted. Sure, praise here is “manipulative” in that it’s an attempt to influence behavior—but the same quality is true of criticism. In practice, genuine praise for the positive opposite is exactly functionally equivalent to criticizing unwanted behavior—just more pleasant for both parties. Even if they look identical on a ledger, most people prefer an “early bird discount” to a “late fee.”

To be sure, praising the positive opposite isn’t always a viable option. Sometimes there’s a problem that requires immediate attention. Sometimes the particulars of the context make it difficult to offer non-passive-aggressive-sounding praise. But in a trusting relationship over a long period of time, there are almost always opportunities to catch someone in the act of doing right; the rewards of waiting for these moments are worth it.

2. People don’t always know what they do well.

When you interact with someone on a regular basis—at school, work, or home—it’s easy to assume that they already know what they are good at. This is a mistake for two reasons.

First, it’s almost definitionally true that the things which come naturally to us demand less of our conscious attention. People who have a knack for finding themes, or recalling historical dates, or translating between text and images, tend to be surprised that other people don’t find these activities easy. In these situations, it’s helpful to note that those skills—which the person might otherwise be blind to—are actually their unique advantages.

Second, there are some activities which are difficult for pretty much everyone, like doing original research, or pole-vaulting, or learning how to play French horn. Novices in these domains need to be told that the skills they are seeking are inherently hard to acquire (and that they may actually be advancing comparatively quickly), or they might infer a lack of aptitude from the struggle of their own subjective experience.

Both of these blind spots are especially true of young people—but even fully formed adults will still often need to be reminded of their strengths in order to give them the proper weight. The human mind has a distinct negativity bias, which often leads us to focus more on our weaknesses—but this is usually a strategic error.¹ Certainly you should work on weaknesses to ensure they are not a fatal liability; but a much better long-term bet is developing superlative expertise in your wheelhouse, then seeking out situations where you can exploit your superpowers.²

The science of persuasion shows that people are more likely to change their behavior in response to descriptive rather than normative appeals. (According to one such study, people are more likely to reuse hotel towels when told “the majority of guests in this room reuse their towels” than when presented with an environmentalist plea.) I think this is basically true for how we assess our own behavior too: We are to a greater degree motivated to become more “ourselves” than to correct what others see as our deficiencies.

3. Praise makes the evaluator more credible.

The relationship researcher John Gottman claims that in a healthy marriage, you need at least five positive interactions for every one negative. I don’t know how scientific this ratio is, but it is surely directionally true: Again, in order to overcome our natural negativity bias, we need to consciously counterbalance by placing extra emphasis on the positive.

Furthermore, a failure to highlight the positive undermines the credibility of the person giving feedback. Yes, different individuals will naturally prefer more or less of a “tough love” style (maybe some need a 10:1 or 1:1 ratio instead of Gottman’s suggested 5:1); but if no positive observations are ever made, then one begins to doubt the impartiality of the evaluator.

In other words, some variety of positive, negative, and even random observations (i.e., whose valence is uncertain) gives the feedback recipient confidence that its giver will tell the truth no matter what. Ironically, this makes constructive criticism more likely to be taken seriously when it is offered: It cannot be just because the evaluator is indiscriminately biased against me, the recipient must admit. If I accept what they say I’m doing right, I should also accept what they say I’m doing wrong.

Each of these three factors helps explain why praise is at least as effective as criticism. Why, then, is it so often neglected in popular conceptions of how people learn and self-improve? It’s clear that, in many people’s minds, the work “feedback” does not conjure the possibility of positive feedback at all.

Perhaps we are blind to the benefits of praise because we are beguiled by the fact that something so warm and fuzzy-feeling could also possess incisive tactical advantages. Perhaps is is because, as recent research suggests, we systematically overestimate the awkwardness and underestimate the received happiness associated with giving compliments. Perhaps, we’ve simply inferred a spurious correlation between criticism and improved performance.³ Whatever the reason, I don’t think enough of us have internalized the fact that praise is not just “nice” but very often strategic.

I believe in direct, honest feedback. I strive not to shy away from tough conversations when necessary, and to deliver constructive criticism calmly and clearly. But praise can be direct and honest too, and adding it to your toolkit can help you achieve your professed goals more effectively and with less interpersonal conflict.

Finally, a word of caution: The fact that praise is often strategic is not a justification for dispensing it falsely. Rather, the best positive feedback is authentic, specific, and above all true. It just so happens that in the long-run, these are the very qualities that make it so effective, by ensuring incentives are aligned between giver and recipient.

1. Of course a bias toward negativity has obvious evolutionary advantages (e.g., making us alert to threat); it’s just that in our modern environment, extreme risk aversion is much less adaptive than it was in an era when expulsion from the tribe spelled certain death or you could be attacked at any moment by a pack of wild beasts.

2. “Focus on your strengths, not your weaknesses” is even more true in team contexts or collaborations, where different individuals can compensate for each other’s relative shortcomings.

3. In Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahnneman describes this cognitive error in greater detail:

I had one of the most satisfying eureka experiences of my career while teaching flight instructors in the Israeli Air Force about the psychology of effective training. I was telling them about an important principle of skill training: rewards for improved performance work better than punishment for mistakes. This proposition is supported by much evidence from research on pigeons, rats, humans, and other animals.

When I had finished my enthusiastic speech, one of the most seasoned instructors in the audience raised his hand and made a short speech of his own. He began by conceding that rewarding improved performance might be good for the birds, but he denied that it was optimal for flight cadets. This is what he said: “On many occasions I have praised flight cadets for clean execution of some aerobatic maneuver. The next time they try the same maneuver they usually do worse. On the other hand, I have often screamed into a cadet’s earphone for bad execution, and in general he does better on his next try. So please don't tell us that reward works and punishment does not, because the opposite is the case.”

This was a joyous moment of insight, when I saw in a new light a principle of statistics that I had been teaching for years. The instructor was right—but he was also completely wrong! His observation was astute and correct: occasions on which he praised a performance were likely to be followed by a disappointing performance, and punishments were typically followed by improvement. But the inference he had drawn about the efficacy of reward and punishment was completely off the mark. What he had observed was known as regression to the mean, which in that case was due to random fluctuations in the quality of performance.

…

The challenge called for a response…I used chalk to mark a target on the floor. I asked every officer in the room to turn his back to the target and throw two coins at it in immediate succession, without looking. We measured the distances from the target and wrote the two results of each contestant on the blackboard…It was apparent that most (but not all) of those who had done best the first time deteriorated on their second try, and those who had done poorly on the first attempt generally improved. I pointed out to the instructors that…poor performance was typically followed by improvement and good performance by deterioration, without any help from either praise or punishment.