Research by a psychology expert at Queen Mary, University of London found that when people received either positive or negative feedback about their performance on complex decision-making tasks, it made their decision making worse.
"The kind of task people had to perform was difficult and demanding. So, when people received positive or negative feedback, it overloaded them with too much information and distracted them from making a good decision," study author Dr Magda Osman said.
"We found that people's performance got worse when they had to make sense of the feedback they were given while also performing the main task," Osman added.
"The role of feedback is overemphasised. People typically think that any form of feedback should improve performance in many tasks, and the more frequently it is given the better performance will be," Osman said in a statement.
"However what needs to be considered is how complex the task is in the first place, because this will determine how much feedback will actually interfere with rather than facilitate performance," Osman said.
The study involved about 100 people who were given the task of choosing how best to either predict or control the state of health of a baby, revealing that feedback can play a negative role in a particularly complex decision-making scenario.
"We have shown that feedback really doesn't help people who are making complex decisions. People in management positions need to give their staff more time to analyse and evaluate things in detail when dealing with difficult situations so they can come up with solutions without any distractions in order to get the best out of them," Osman said.
The study was published in the journal Frontiers in Neuroscience.
