Japanese scientists have found scientific evidence that people work better when someone else compliments them.
The team had previously discovered that there is an area of the brain, the striatum, which is activated when a person is rewarded with a compliment or cash. Your latest research might suggest that when the striatum is activated it seems to encourage the person to perform better during the performance of a job.
The study included 48 adults who were asked to perform a typing exercise as fast as possible. The exercise consisted of pressing the keys in a particular sequence. They had 30 seconds to perform this pattern on the keyboard and they had to do it as quickly as possible.
The 48 adults were separated into 3 groups:
1) A group included a person who evaluated them individually.
2) Another group included an evaluator who gave a compliment or praise to each member of the group.
3) The third group evaluated their own performance on a graph.
Participants were asked to repeat the exercise the next day. The group of participants who received direct praise from an evaluator performed better than participants from the other groups. This indicates that receiving a compliment after doing an exercise encourages the individual to do it better later.
According to one of the researchers:
“For the brain, receiving a compliment is as much a social reward as it is a money reward. We have been able to find scientific evidence that a person performs better when they receive a social reward after completing an exercise. Congratulating someone can become an easy and effective strategy to use in the classroom, at work, or during rehabilitation. "