Being less good at something impresses people more

[simont]

A long time ago, I was in a nightclub, with a friend, and we ran into a woman who we'd both met a few times before. My friend struggled visibly for a moment, and then correctly remembered her name. She was pleased and flattered. I had known her name immediately without any struggle, but she didn't look flattered at that!

A while back a group of my friends used to play a general-knowledge quiz game. One question I particularly remember from it was ‘Which Bond film was Ringo Starr's wife in?’, which we only managed to answer as a team effort: one of us knew Ringo Starr's wife was Barbara Bach, and another knew Barbara Bach was in ‘The Spy Who Loved Me’, but neither of us knew both facts beforehand. That one sticks in my mind as more memorably satisfying than any of the questions that I got right on my own, even though those demonstrated more knowledge on my part.

If you release a piece of software with a security hole in it, and then fix it promptly and competently when someone finds it, users will be vocally grateful. You'll get compliments on your dedication and your integrity, and it will increase general trust in you to maintain a security product – far more so, in my experience, than if you'd never introduced the hole in the first place.

Psychologically, it's easy to come up with reasons why this general pattern of human behaviour makes sense. But it seems like a cognitive weakness nonetheless: surely there must be a multitude of cases where it creates a perverse incentive to pretend to be less competent than you are, or to make deliberate mistakes so you can earn kudos for fixing them…

Comments

[simont]

someone putting in More Effort will tend to get More Praise even if the effort is ineffective/inefficient/misdirected/etc
[...]
Given the assumption that screw-ups will happen, the sooner you get data on how they'll be handled -- whether they'll be handled well -- the sooner you get reassurance that it's "safe"(r) to invest (time/energy/finance/emotion)

*nodnod* yes. When I said in my original post that it was easy to think of reasons why it made sense for people to act this way, both of these ideas were the kind of thing I had in mind.

You could construe both of them as different facets of the more central question of how, or whether, or how well, people can stretch themselves past their existing limits. If you're tackling a problem beyond the size you can solve effortlessly, do you have the concentration, determination, and straight-up endurance to put in enough effort to solve the larger problem? And if you're tackling a problem beyond the complexity you can solve without errors, will you cope sensibly with the inevitability of making errors? (Fixing them when found, fixing them even when you're more interested in moving on to the next problem, reliably adding regression tests to stop the same problems coming back, etc...)

And, as you say, this really is an important thing to want to know about somebody whose problem-solving (or whatever) you're likely to be depending on, because problems beyond their comfort zone will come up sooner or later. It even makes sense to consider 'are you able to stretch past your limits?' as a more important question than 'where are your limits right now?'.

It's just that it's also true that it introduces perverse incentives. One of the risks of using old-chestnut puzzle questions in job interviews, for example, is that some candidates will have heard them before and already know the answer. The good case of that is that the candidate owns up to knowing the answer already, in which case the question is merely inconclusive, and you have to try harder to come up with a different question that will actually make them think. But the bad case is if the candidate is a bit more quick-thinking and/or unscrupulous, and pretends never to have seen the question before, in order to simulate solving it on the spot in a plausible but better-than-average length of time.