FACT SHEET

The Performance

Trap

Contents

The Performance Trap is when writers unconsciously build monuments to their own knowledge instead of centering the intended audience.

  • Part One: The research that discovered the phenomenon
  • Part Two: Why it matters

Part ONE

The Research

01

The Influence of the Task

In 1989, Moshe Cohen (Research Department, Ministry of Education, Jerusalem) and Margaret Riel (University of California, San Diego) researched how writing changes when its underlying purpose changes. To find out, they tasked seventh-grade students with writing about the same subject twice. The first essay was for teachers who would evaluate the writing as part of a graded assignment. The second essay was for peers in other countries who would read and respond to the content. 

The writing directed toward peers rated significantly higher in organization, clarity, and detail. The writing directed at teachers moved in the opposite direction. It was more formulaic, less developed, and oriented less toward making ideas clear than toward proving the writer’s command of the material. The topic had not changed. The students had not changed. The knowledge they were drawing on had not changed. The only difference was who they believed they were writing for and why. That shift alone was enough to reshape the output.

02

Compensatory Conspicuous Communication

In 2020, Zachariah Brown (Columbia), Eric Anicich (USC), and Adam Galinsky (Columbia) published a study in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes investigating what triggers the shift from communication to performance. They began with an analysis of approximately 64,000 dissertation titles and found that authors from lower-ranked universities consistently used more jargon than authors from higher-ranked ones. The pattern held across three distinct forms of jargon: unnecessarily complex language, acronyms, and legalese.

To isolate the cause, they ran a series of controlled experiments. In one, MBA students were asked to describe a business idea. Those who had been told they would be compared to established entrepreneurs—a high-status audience—used significantly more jargon than those told they would be compared to undergraduates. The content of the ideas did not change. What changed was the students’ sense of where they stood relative to their audience.

The researchers traced the mechanism to a specific cognitive shift: when a person feels their status is being evaluated, their priority moves from being understood to being perceived as competent. Language stops functioning as a tool for clarity and starts functioning as a tool for display. The paper established that this is not a conscious decision but an automatic response to feeling judged.

03

The Accountability Effect

In 1983, psychologist Philip Tetlock began investigating what happens when writers know their work will be scrutinized. The answer, he found, depends on what the writer knows about the person evaluating them.

When the evaluator’s expectations are unknown, the writer unconsciously attempts to insulate themselves from potential criticism by anticipating all possible objections and weaving counterarguments into their reasoning from the start. The more uncertain the writer is about what the evaluator will focus on, the more detail, caveats, and extensions of logic get added.

The result is often a document that covers everything and prioritizes nothing.

Part two

Why It Matters

The Performance Trap is a failure of orientation that centers the writer over the reader.

When writers are uncertain about how their work will be evaluated, the brain defaults to adding more and more information in an effort to protect the writer from potential criticism. Language shifts to signal expertise. Organization weakens because nothing is allowed to be excluded.

To the writer, the resulting document feels rigorous because it reflects everything they know and everything they can defend. But the reader experiences something else entirely as they try to extract meaning from unprioritized information and unnecessary complexity.

A performative document that does not guide the reader to a decision is not effective communication. It is a knowledge dump with the author’s name on it.

Schedule
A
Consultation

Let me know when you are ready to discuss your project. I live on the East Coast of the United States and work with clients around the world.

michie@michiekane.com