S=P−E

Please consider this list:

* A movie/restaurant/book which didn’t live up to the hype

* A conversation with a friend which was disturbingly unsatisfying

* Christmas

No doubt you’ve experienced all those disappointments, as have I, and my theory is it’s all due to expectations.

We all do it and have it done for us: movies, restaurants and books are talked up by friends, online chats and reviews; our history with a particular person leads us to expect the relationship will always be as fulfilling, as wonderful, as it was in the beginning or even middle; and Christmas, well enough said.

This is not to say we shouldn’t be optimistic and look forward to things, but when we do, it’s probably good practice to recognize the expectations we have and assess if they are realistic, optimistic, or flat out unattainable. Managing our own expectations, and those of others, is an enormous task but it’s pretty big in the world of big deals.

Here are just a few examples and I’m sure you can come up with dozens more.

Starting with job interviews where your resume and/or background check establishes expectations on the part of the interviewers. I had a British client many years ago who wanted to relocate from Toronto to Vancouver. He had an impressive resume but when we met in person it became glaringly obvious what was happening. He had that lovely, plummy accent and wore the full banker pin-striped, three piece suit, de rigeur in those days in Toronto but always a little too-too here on the left coast. The overwhelming response he had been receiving is that he was overqualified, even if he wasn’t, and that he would accept a better offer immediately. In his case the resume was what it was and the accent was indelible, but the wardrobe was doing a lot of the storytelling on his behalf, and not to his benefit.

Sometimes your success before a live audience, or a potential new client, can be made or broken by how you are introduced, which sets certain expectations. There are so many ways an introduction can go wrong, from the MC stealing your opening line, to one who reads your entire resume verbatim, to the one who oversells your impact on the audience. You’ll laugh ‘til you choke. Ohkaaaay…

Judee Burgoon’s Expectations Violations Theory looks at how people react to violations of social norms and their own expectations. In a nutshell, violations cause arousal which forces cognitive appraisal. EVT says violations can work for you when they exceed low or moderate expectations, rather than simply meeting a high one (leave while they still want you to stay). Some people can get away with farting on stage, if they are perceived to have status or expertise which somehow balances it out. (Burgoon didn’t say that, I did.) In the case of the job interview, the same answer or statement can come across as confidence or arrogance, depending on the baseline expectation the interviewer came in with.

There are numerous quotes about first impressions but the most on-the-nose ones rely on the impact of managing expectations. If your appearance or wardrobe is a mismatch to that of a new contact, it will potentially dig a hole from which you will have to climb, or a hill from which you’ll have to descend.

Swiped out, rejection sucks.

What could be more horrific, in terms of setting unrealistic expectations, than dating apps? Do we really have to go there? If you’ll allow, I’ll just dip your toe in with this summary of a multi author piece out of Austria which looked at the gap between dating app users’ expectations and outcomes. Not surprisingly they found that when the gap looked to be small, excitement and eagerness followed but when the gap was bigger, frustration and disappointment followed, in terms of subsequent behaviour on the app. Swiping “no” repeatedly until, finally, someone with potential appears and you swipe “yes”, only to have your hopes dashed when they don’t reciprocate.

They also noted that the gamified swiping turns the quest for romance into an online loops of micro rewards and rapid crashes, resulting in emotional depletion. How many times have you heard a friend say, I am getting off this app, it is killing me!

The equation in this post’s title isn’t mine. It belongs to David Maister who coined it in his 1985 paper, “The Psychology of Waiting Lines”.

He concludes that when we expect a certain level of service and get more than we expected, our satisfaction is greater but if we get the exact same level of service when we expected more, our satisfaction is diminished. In other words, the product is the same, it’s how we went into the experience that changes how it turns out. The product isn’t better or worse by any measure, it’s only better or worse relative to what you expected or were told to expect, hence the management of expectation for, and by, others.

He cites one study where a hotel was receiving complaints the the elevators were too slow. Without changing the elevators one bit, the hotel instead installed mirrors on the walls beside the elevator doors. People inevitably checked their hair and teeth, making the wait seem much shorter. Complaints trailed off.

Dr. Jason Fung had a post just a day ago, about the viscosity of food determining how full people feel and how it helps them stop overeating. One of the studies he cited told some people in advance that the liquid they were going to drink would turn to jelly in their stomachs and the other group that it would remain as liquid. The group that expected the jelly feeling ate far less pizza in their next monitored meal so expectations even affect the physical sense of fullness.

Maister also writes about the restaurant experience, especially how long you wait to be seated. Bottom line is you can spend all kinds of effort improving service times or you can tell a little fib about the length of the expected wait. When people are seated earlier than they were told to expect, they’re already happy. When it’s the other way around the server is already playing catch up, which rarely turns out well.

There is, however, a moment of power when a customer is disappointed or even angered. Let’s say the kitchen completely overcooked an expensive cut of meat, rendering it unpalatable to the one who ordered it. If the server responds in an immediate and positive way, that customer will go away happier THAN IF THE PROBLEM HAD NEVER OCCURRED. So, how you respond to dashed expectations can change the equation. The new equation is really the same one, repeated. (S=P-E) x 2. The second time is about the expectation of how a complaint gets handled which, let’s face it, is brutally low for most of us (defensiveness, a comped drink or a shrug) so anything beyond a sullen redo is more positive. It’s actually got a name: the service recovery paradox, not discovered by my daughter in her food service days, but certainly experienced by her.

One caveat though, service recovery can beat perfection but only for small things. Had that steak made someone hospital level ill, apologizing and offering a new one won’t cut it.

9-1-1, what’s your emergency?

In emergency services, it’s a well-known phenomenon that response time is in the eye of the beholder. People simply don’t believe the fire/police/ambulance arrived within 4 minutes because for them, waiting for help felt like an eternity. The time is exactly what it measurably is, but once again, the perception changes it. When it comes to expectations of response time, that comes straight from television medical and police/fire series.

And here’s another interesting twist. In 2004 the term, CSI effect was invented, describing artificial expectations of what forensic science could deliver. Rather than getting DNA analysis within a one-hour show time, DNA results from the RCMP’s 6 labs in Canada could take weeks or months. Ironically, the RCMP itself set a performance standard of 15 days for so-called standard requests and no more than 30 days for routine ones. Go figure what the difference is between standard and routine, I don’t speak Mountie fluently.

Former RCMP Commissioner Giuliano Zaccardelli told a Parliamentary committee in 2004 that DNA analysis for major cases was being completed within 15 days. I beg to differ, said the Auditor General, who found the real numbers: DNA analysis was taking 91 days on average in 2004 and was even longer (114 days) by 2005-6. Fewer than 1 percent of DNA samples were being processed within the two-week target, leading to countless judicial travesties.

In Newfoundland, a hugely pregnant woman testified for three hours over two days, recounting being raped and threated by a former intimate partner. Three years after the arrest, the judge stayed the charges because of delays in the disclosure of forensic evidence.

In a rural Alberta case, a homeowner was charged with shooting at a trespasser, and the Crown told the court it could take eight to twelve months just to get a ballistics report back from the RCMP lab. Dismissed.

Ten bucks for every A on your report card

As a parent, we always want to motivate our kids to live up to their potential and I’ve heard all manner of creative ways of attempting that. The research says a parent who affirms their child’s competence and supports their skill development will get better results than one who promises rewards contingent on outcomes and compliance. When you ask teenagers, they will anecdotally tell you that they perceive parents’ behaviour differently than do their parents, especially when it comes to expectations. Shocker (sic).

In one study, kids in 200 urban schools in the US were either paid to read books, rewarded for test performance or rewarded for final grades. It found the impact of financial incentives was barely more than zero in all cases. The only one that moved the needle even a teeny bit was paying kids for reading books, tying the reward to a behaviour rather than an outcome, but even that was hardly worth a statistical mention.

Red or White?

One of the favourite studies which my late colleague, David McPhillips and I trotted out in our persuasion course, is what I consistently and incorrectly referred to as the Stanford wine experiment. (It was Stanford and Caltech.) In this clever bit of research, people were recruited to taste wine while connected to an fMRI, a functional MRI which measures activity in the medial orbitofrontal cortex, the part of your brain that lets you experience pleasure.

They told the drinkers they would be tasting wines which varied from $5 to $90 per bottle when, in fact, it was all the same wine in variously labelled bottles. Amazingly, though, the fMRI measured greater mOFC activity when drinking the “higher priced” vintage, showing that the actual enjoyment was greater, not just the stated opinion, again based on an expectation that a $90 bottle would be better than a $5 bottle, something you’d probably expect as well. One of the authors of the study, Baba Shiv, wrote, “What we document is that price is not just about inferences of quality, but it can actually affect real quality... it is changing people’s experiences with a product and, therefore, the outcomes from consuming this product.”

If you can’t get no satisfaction, maybe it’s your expectations getting in the way of your medial orbitofrontal cortex.

Satisfaction isn’t a function of absolute quality of a service, product or experience, then, but rather the size of the gap between expectation and perceived delivery. One could argue that not expecting much of a cheap bottle of wine will probably be an easier to swallow experience than paying top dollar for one where you can’t quite taste the price.

I know you’re all expecting to see Jagger, but your expectations will not be met here, possibly leading to disappointment and dissatisfaction. Sorry. A man hears what he wants to hear, and disregards the rest, after all.

Until next time, ask yourself lie la lie, lie la lie, lie, lie, lie, lie.