ABSTRACT
Leaders and organizations often expose people to selective information about their peers as a motivational tool (e.g., photos on lobby walls of exemplary employees’ smiling faces, graphs showing customers that they are less energy efficient than their neighbors). This chapter shows that such practices can backfire when they lead people to perceive that the level of performance of their exemplary peers is out of reach. Such discouragement undermines motivation and success and causes deidentification with the relevant domain. People frequently conform to what they perceive to be the typical behaviors of other people. For example, when people perceive that they use more energy than their neighbors, they tend to reduce their energy use; when people hear that most people vote, they become more motivated to vote; when people learn that people similar to themselves reuse resources, they tend to reuse resources; and when students see reductions in school harassment, they become less likely to engage in harassment.
