The ‘sour-grape effect’

 The ‘sour-grape effect’

Let’s first examine the sour-grape effect, discovered by Hallgeir Sjåstad, a professor of psychology and leadership at the Norwegian School of Economics, and colleagues.

He says he was intrigued by people’s tendency to abandon their dreams prematurely. “The research was an attempt to understand why we sometimes give up too early, even though we could have succeeded if we had been a bit more patient and willing to give it a second try,” he says. 

In his first experiment, Sjåstad asked participants to take a practice trial of a test said to measure the precision of their intuition. They were asked to estimate how much 20 apples would weigh, for example – and they were told that a guess falling within 10% of the real answer would be considered a sign of strong intuition. High performance on several questions, they were told, correlated strongly to “positive outcomes in life, such as extraordinary achievements in work and a well-functioning social life” – a message that was designed to increase their desire to succeed. 

After answering a couple of practice questions, the participants were given sham feedback – either very positive or very negative. They were then asked to predict how difficult it would be to perform well in the real test, and how happy they would feel if they scored 100%.

Sjåstad hypothesised that the people who were given negative feedback about their practice answers would underestimate the importance of their future performance for their emotional state. And this was exactly what happened. The people who felt they’d failed on the practice run predicted that a perfect score would do little to increase their immediate happiness. Crucially, this did not turn out to be true; when they took a second test and were told they received top marks, the good news really did make them happy. They had been completely wrong in assuming that the result would not make them proud.

Sjåstad says this is self-protective. “Most of us want to think of ourselves as competent and capable people, so when external feedback suggests otherwise, it poses a serious threat to that self-image,” he says. “The easiest way out is to deny or explain away the external signal, so we can reduce the inconsistency and preserve a positive sense of self. I think we do this all time, even without noticing.” (It’s worth noting that after each of these experiments, Sjåstad debriefed his participants, so they did not leave with a false impression of their intuitive abilities.)