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’ success stories through regular progress reports, it is thought, can motivate the rest of the group’s members to follow suit.

In a  paper published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, a group of four researchers describe this phenomenon as “vicarious goal satiation.” Kathleen McCulloch of Idaho State University, Grainné Fitzsimmons of Duke University, Sook Ning Chua of McGill University and Dolores Albarracín of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign report the results of two separate experiments designed to measure how people perform after watching another’s 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.