Invisible Influence (26 page)

But is being behind always more motivating?

Richard “Pancho” Gonzales was one of the best tennis players of all time. Born in Los Angeles, California, in 1928, Gonzales is one of the game's few Mexican-American stars. His mother gave him a fifty-one-cent racquet when he was twelve years old and
he never looked back. Largely self-taught, he learned to play by watching players at the nearby public courts. He was 6'3” by the time he reached nineteen years old, and his height helped him develop a dominating serve that overpowered opponents.

Gonzales was ranked the best player in the world for a record eight years in a row. He won seventeen major singles titles over the course of his career, including two Grand Slams. When the editors of
Sports Illustrated
picked their favorite athletes of the twentieth century, they ranked Gonzales fifteenth, saying that if the fate of the earth was on the line in a tennis match, Gonzales would be the man humankind would want serving.

One of Gonzales's most unusual matches, though, was in 1969 against Charlie Pasarell at Wimbledon. Gonzales was a forty-one-year old at the time and a grandfather. Pasarell was not only much younger (twenty-five) but had trained under Gonzales, learning his technique by copying the older man's strokes.

The match started with each player holding his serve. When Gonzales served, Gonzales won the game. When Pasarell served, Pasarell won the game. This went back and forth. First for five games, then ten, then fifteen. Numerous times Gonzales saved set points to avoid defeat. Twenty games, then thirty, then forty. Finally, with a lob to the back edge of the baseline in the forty-sixth game, Pasarell broke Gonzales's serve. The first set was his, twenty-four games to twenty-two.

The second set began a little after seven p.m. It was a gloomy day in London and the light was fading. Gonzales complained about the deteriorating visibility, but the tournament referee ignored him. Whether because he was angry, or couldn't see, Gonzales lost again, but much faster this time, 1–6. Play was called after the end of the second set.

The next morning proved better weather, and the players
returned to the closely fought contest. Gonzales bent repeatedly but never broke, and the sets crept upward, 6–6, 8–8, and 10–10. Pasarell soon began to feel the pressure of trying to finish off his former mentor. After twenty-nine sets, Pasarell double faulted twice and lost the third set 14–16.

At this point the tide had begun to turn. Pasarell double-faulted again and lost the fourth set 3–6. Now the match was tied, two sets to two. Gonzales looked tired, leaning on his racquet between points and stalling for time. But he would not give up. Pasarell had him on the ropes time and time again, but couldn't push it through. Gonzales was serving at 4–5 down 0–40 but the lob shots that had worked so well for Pasarell earlier in the match began to falter. Gonzales fought back, and seven deuces later, he won to tie the score at 5–5.

Pasarell won the next game, but Gonzales again came from 0–40 to tie things at 6–6. Again the momentum shifted back and forth as the game tally went higher and higher. Eventually Gonzales won the final 11 points to win the set 11–9, and the match.

The contest had lasted more than 5 hours and spanned more than 110 games. It's one of the longest singles matches in the history of Wimbledon.

Based in part on this epic contest, Wimbledon introduced the tiebreak in 1971. Rather than playing game after game until someone gets ahead by two, for sets tied at six games each, a tiebreak game determines the winner.
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Players alternate serving and whoever scores 7 points first wins (as long as they have 2 points more than their opponent). Tiebreak games can still go on for a
while, but they decrease the chance matches go on for as long as Gonzales and Pasarell did.

Similar to our work on basketball, an economist wondered how losing in tennis would affect performance.
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Take a player who loses a tiebreak: Does that loss influence how well he plays the rest of the match?

After analyzing thousands of matches, he found that the answer was a resounding yes. But the impact is actually the opposite of what we found in basketball. Rather than leading players to do better, losing led tennis players to do
worse
. Players that lose a first-set tiebreak lose an extra game, on average, in the second set.

Why would that be?

It's tempting to attribute the differing impact of losing to distinctions between the two sports. Basketball is a team sport, while tennis is an individual one. Basketball games last less than an hour, while tennis matches often go on for two or three times as long. There are a number of other differences.

But it turns out that the disparity has less to do with distinctions between basketball and tennis and more to do with the size of the discrepancy, or how bad the losers were losing.

People get more motivated as they get closer to their goal. Take the cards you get at coffee shops, bagel stores, or as part of other loyalty programs. These cards reward frequent patronage with free stuff. Buy nine coffees, get the tenth free. Every sixth bagel is complimentary. Rewards like these encourage people to return to the store, but how motivating they are depends on how close people are to achieving the reward. Compared to people who have just started the card, people who have almost completed it buy much faster.
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Feeling like we're almost there makes us more motivated, so we come back to the store sooner.

Animals show the same pattern of behavior.
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Compared to rats that just started running a maze, those close to reaching a reward (cheese, for example) run faster. The closer they are, the more motivated they become.

In competition, then, it's not just about being behind. It's about
how far behind
someone is. Being down by a little is often more motivating than being down by a lot because people are closer to achieving their goal of winning.

Take a team losing by one point at halftime. They're almost there. They're just like the rat that runs around the corner and sees the cheese. If they play good defense, and hit an extra shot, they can close the gap. If they give just a little bit more effort, they can go from losing to winning. As a basketball announcer might say, they're so close they can almost taste it.

Compare that to a team that's further behind. Say, losing by 8 points. They're still in the game, but they're not almost there. They have to make a number of stops on defense, make a number of extra shots, and maybe even go on a run. There is a lot between them and winning. They may be able to smell winning, but they're too far away to taste it.

When we're further back, it's harder to muster that extra motivation. The team down by 8 would still like to win, but they are so far behind that winning seems less likely. And it's harder to encourage that extra effort if we're not sure it will make much of a difference.

Along these lines, social comparisons not only increase motivation, they can also decrease it.

Rather than being down by 8 points, imagine being down by 20 or 25. You're so far back that the chance of winning seems remote. So many things would have to go right for you to catch up that you doubt it's even possible. So you begin to give up. In
situations where success starts to seem impossible, motivation decreases. Competition becomes demotivating.

And that's what happened to tennis players who lost the tiebreak. Winning the match didn't become impossible, but it became a lot more difficult. For best-of-three set matches, two sets is enough to win. So someone who just lost the first set tiebreak went from being almost halfway to winning the match to being halfway to losing it. They're not just behind by a little, they're behind by a lot.
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This rapid shift in relative performance should be particularly demotivating. Sure, being behind doesn't feel good, but it feels particularly bad when you were almost ahead by a bunch and then lost it. It's like thinking you're the top choice to be promoted and then finding out you're actually at the bottom of the list. Being at the bottom never feels good, but it's particularly bad when the top seemed oh, so close.
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Not surprisingly, being too far behind can also lead people to quit.
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To give up and stop trying altogether.

But interestingly, being far behind others isn't the only reason people quit. Quitting also depends on how well people expected to do compared to others in the first place.

In tennis, one player is often designated the favorite. They are ranked higher based on their recent performance in other matches. Similarly, compared to an upstart no one has ever heard of, most people expect an incumbent politician to win (as long as his or her tenure in office has been good).

But while favorites
should
perform better, this expectation often brings along additional baggage. People expect them to do well and this makes the potential of losing (and violating those expectations) even worse. If an underdog loses, it doesn't reflect that badly on the underdog. They were expected to lose, so losing doesn't change how people see them. But if the favorite loses, it has a more negative impact on others' impressions. They were expected to win, and anything less signals that the favorite might not have been so great after all.

Consequently, competitors may search for a way to self-handicap. An excuse in the event of poor performance.

Someone worried about blowing a big presentation, for example,
might paradoxically stay out late the night before because it creates a handy external attribution for failure. If the presentation goes badly, he has an excuse. Rather than indicating something about their ability, there is now another explanation for any potential failure:
If I hadn't been out late, I would have done just fine.

Quitting serves a similar function. Rather than sticking it out and losing, quitting allows competitors to preserve the notion that if they had just kept going, they would have won. That they were actually the stronger competitor, even though it didn't play out that way in the end.

Researchers found that favorites are more likely to quit for exactly this reason.
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Compared to underdogs, tennis players favored to win were more likely to quit mid-match. Players who were ranked higher going in were more likely to throw in the towel, both literally and figuratively, particularly if they lost the first set.

For players who were supposed to win, but now looked like they might actually lose, quitting became a way to save face.

People and organizations often drop out of competitions. Basketball players pull up lame after shooting a jumper and sit out the rest of the game. Politicians drop out of the race to spend more time with their families. Companies take their name out of consideration for a contract to focus on other strategic priorities.

In some cases, quitting is warranted. The player hurt their leg, the politician loves their family, and the contract just wasn't in line with where the company saw its business going.

But in other cases, quitting provides a clever defense mechanism that enables people to avoid failure. It allows us to preserve the notion that we could have been successful if we had tried.
That if we had just kept competing, and pushed through it, we would have emerged victorious.

Where do these thoughts lead? Whether trying to inspire a sales team to work harder or encourage students to learn more, social comparisons can be a powerful motivating force. Giving people a sense of how they stack up against their peers can encourage them to work harder and be more likely to achieve their goals. At the same time, though, if not carefully designed, social comparisons can lead people to get disheartened, give up, and quit.

Unfortunately, many companies and classrooms use a winner-take-all model. The person who makes the most sales this quarter gets promoted. The top student is named valedictorian and speaks at graduation.

While this strategy motivates people who have a chance at the top slot, it often demotivates those who feel they have no shot at winning. Someone who has only half as many sales as the leader may think they are so far back that they just give up. Students that are getting Cs or Ds may feel similarly. Getting an A seems impossible, so why keep trying?

One way to encourage perseverance is to shrink the comparison set. Breaking larger groups up into smaller ones based on performance. Golf tournaments organize participants into groups of similar skill. This encourages golfers to compare themselves to others of similar ability, which decreases the chance they feel far behind and helps maintain motivation.

Similarly, rather than comparing people to everyone else, some organizations give people feedback that compares them to the person just ahead of them. Opower doesn't compare people
to their best-performing neighbor, they tell people where they are in relation to neighbors with similar homes. Just like basketball teams that were down by a point, making each person feel slightly behind increases effort and performance.

Social comparisons can also be made to other classes or firms. Rental car company Avis, for example, used to claim that they tried harder because they were number two rather than number one. Harvard professor Todd Rogers and UC Berkeley professor Don Moore tested a version of this idea in politics. They sent out e-mails to more than a million Florida Democrats suggesting that their gubernatorial candidate was either winning or losing by a little in the polls. Emphasizing that the candidate was behind raised 60 percent more money.
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Thinking their candidate was losing by a little motivated people to do something about it.

These ideas even have implications for whom to hire. Picking someone who is qualified, but for whom the job is a slight stretch, often nets more motivated individuals. When looking for state directors, for example, President Obama's 2008 campaign preferred to pick someone who had previously been a deputy director, rather than someone who had been a director many times already. Not only were these folks cheaper, but it created a group of individuals who had something to prove. They saw themselves as slightly behind, and were more motivated and less likely to be complacent.
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