Why do people feel the need to make changes to a solution presented by another person?

Question

There is an interesting phenomenon I have come across several times when working with groups, and that is the need some people have to make changes to a solution that someone else created.

The change is often superficial or doesn't substantively change the solution, however the person making the suggestion is often adamant that the change is vital.

In a question on the User Experience SE, some comments were made about how to plan for and mitigate this:

People are natural complainers. So next time you present a design make sure there are 1 or more subtle defects you're sure they notice. They'll complain about those, you say ok and fix them. if you present a perfect design, they'll still find stuff regardless.

And:

That reminds me of the Battle Chess duck - It was well known that producers had to make a change to everything that was done. The artist working on the queen animations came up with an innovative solution. He did the animations for the queen the way that he felt would be best, with one addition: he gave the queen a pet duck. He took great care to make sure that it never overlapped the "actual" animation. Eventually, it came time for the producer to review the animation set for the queen. His comments, "that looks great. Just one thing - get rid of the duck."

Is this a known phenomena in Cognitive Sciences?

It seems to indicate a need/desire on the part of the person making the suggestion to exert some control over an external process but I wonder if it is more elemental/basic than that?

Answer 1

This sounds to me very much (but not exactly) like a phenomenon Dan Ariely has done some research on, which he terms 'the IKEA effect'. Of course, he will describe it better than me, specifically in Norton and Ariely (2012), Ariely et al (2008), and this TED talk.

Basically, what he's found is that people value things (furniture, lego models, plans) more when they themselves have contributed their own labour in creating them.

In Ariely et al (2008), they found that:

• People are more willing to do dull, monotonous paperwork for less money if their name goes on the top of the sheet, and less willing if the paper was shredded after they had finished.
• The same effect is found if you pay people to put together Lego models: people do more for less money if you don't take apart the models afterwards.

Norton and Ariely (2012) took a different approach, but showed largely the same thing:

• People believe that the IKEA furniture which they themselves assembled was worth more than anyone else's furniture (measured by how much they would pay to keep it)
• The same effect was found for origami animals.
• ..and for Lego models, but not if you take the model apart after you build it (because it's no longer the thing which you created).
• ...and not getting to finish assembling the furniture reduces this bias.

Hopefully, the link between this research and your question should be clear: by making changes to a solution, that solution becomes in some way 'ours', and because of that, we overestimate it's intrinsic value.

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References

Michael I. Norton, Dan Ariely, and Daniel Mochon (2012), “The IKEA effect: When labor leads to love.” Journal of Consumer Psychology. Vol. 22: 453-460.

Dan Ariely, Emir Kamenica and Drazen Prelec (2008), “Man’s Search for Meaning: The Case of Legos.” Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization. Vol. 67: 671-677.

Answer 2

This is often a common phenomenon, but the context that you cited in your question might hold the key to one possible explanation. When you are presenting your design to someone who is "supposed" to evaluate your design, finding flaws enforces the self-efficacy of the evaluator and signals to him that he's doing his job well. So, the boost to self-efficacy/self-esteem might be a strong motivation for the evaluator to disproportionately criticize small issues with your design.

In addition, there is an even more fundamental human psychology that plays a role here -- the egocentricity/false consensus bias i.e. the idea that everyone else shares the same opinion about an idea as we do. The evaluator of the design might have an expectation of what the "correct" submission looks like, and any deviation from this expectation will be immediately noticed (and frowned upon). I've worked in a software development firm for a while and I see this happening all the time in teams that span product developers, product testers and product managers.

(Ref: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False-consensus_effect)

Answer 3

It is easy.

1. Something bad happened, spreads fast, and is related with psychological satisfaction.
2. Something good will be forgotten fast because you are satisfied you are done with it.

In your example, the solution does not satisfy audience. They wanna make changes. After changes they will forget about the solution, because the solution satisfied them. This is similar to bad customer service: see Bad Customer Service Interactions More Likely to be Shared Than Good Ones.

Perspective matters! You can go from point A to B by car, train, motorbike, bus, ship, plane, helicopter etc. Going with a car is your solution, but going with a train is somebody else's solution. It is all about satisfaction, psychology and perspective! Regards.