"Praise makes people slack"

This is the belief that keeps the scan in charge at work, and often at home too. If you start saying things are fine, people will think they've arrived. Standards will slide. The reason the report is good is that your colleague knows you'll find the wrong total. Thank them for the forty pages and next quarter it'll be thirty-eight.

Let me separate two things that this belief runs together. One is the standard, which is what counts as good enough. The other is the commentary, which is what you say. The belief assumes that the standard is held up by the commentary, so that if you stop commenting on faults, or start commenting on the fine, the standard drops.

But the standard lives in the fault list, and this book isn't asking you to throw the fault list away. The wrong total still gets raised. The two crosses on the homework still get looked at. What changes is that the fine gets said as well. The report is still held to forty-one right pages, and you're now telling your colleague which forty are right, which is more information about the standard than they had before, not less.

There's also a question about what thanks does to the person who gets it, and here there's some evidence. Kumar and Epley followed the 2018 work with a series of experiments, published in 2023, on small acts of kindness. Giving away a hot drink in a park, a small gift in the lab. The givers again underestimated how good the recipients would feel. The part that's relevant here is the last experiment, in which givers also underestimated what recipients would go on to do. Recipients of a kindness were more generous to a third person afterwards than the givers expected. The good act got passed on.

I'd be careful with that. It's a lab result about strangers and small gifts, and it doesn't say that thanking your colleague will make them work harder. What it does say is that the effect of a kind act on the person receiving it is larger than the person doing it expects, and that it moves what they do as well as how they feel. My own reading is that people repeat what's noticed. If the only things you notice are faults, the only thing your commentary can teach is which faults to avoid. If you notice the fine as well, the commentary can also teach which things to keep doing, and that's the half of the lesson that's been missing.

The word praise is part of the problem, and I'd drop it. Praise is a grade. It says "well done", it comes from above, and it can, I agree, be cheapened by being handed out for nothing. Thanks isn't a grade. It says "I saw that and it mattered to me", and it can only be cheapened by not being true. If the table was laid, thanking someone for laying it isn't going soft on standards. It's reporting a fact that you'd previously left out.