Do you look at others' successes and feel they were easily achieved? It may be because social media shows you only the polished surface of success, like a duck gliding smoothly on water, while the real struggle to stay afloat remains hidden.
A study in Evolutionary Human Sciences explored this phenomenon, dubbed "floating duck syndrome" by Stanford University. Researchers found that the pressure to showcase only the successes and mask the effort behind them skews reality, leading others to misjudge the difficulty of achievement and expect greater rewards for their efforts than they receive.
"We found that not revealing the actual amount of effort results in social learning dynamics that lead others to underestimate the difficulty of the world. This in turn leads individuals both to invest too much total effort and spread this effort over too many activities, reducing the success rate from each activity and creating effort-reward imbalances," Erol Akçay, the study author from the University of Pennsylvania, said in a news release.
The researchers believe that their findings offer a new explanation for why overcommitment and burnout occur in universities, workplaces, and homes.
"These findings matter. Modern life constantly calls upon us to decide how to divide our time and energy between different domains of life, including school, work, family, and leisure. How we allocate our time and energy between these domains, how many different activities we pursue in each domain, and what the resulting rewards are, have profound effects on our mental and physical health," Akçay added.
The analysis also showed that although people may achieve more success overall with increased effort, their success rate per effort decreases because they spread themselves into too many activities.
"Misunderstanding how much effort their peers invest to succeed causes individuals to invest too much total effort, while at the same time dividing it between too many different activities. Our research found that this can indeed lead to a higher number of successes but at the cost of reducing overall utility as well as a mismatch between expected and realized rewards," Akçay said.
The researchers also looked into ways to solve the over-commitment and burnout caused by floating duck syndrome. They suggest that short-term fixes, like making assignments or qualifications easier, may not be effective. Instead, addressing the issue requires tackling the deeper problem of how people underreport their efforts and struggles.
"Floating duck syndrome is often exacerbated by social media platforms and institutional public relations, which make successes more visible but not necessarily failures or the effort spent to achieve successes," Akçay cautioned.
