Why Is Accountability to Others So Powerful?

Accountability: anything or anyone that helps us gain mental leverage to achieve the results we desire. —The Accountability Stop

Looking back over the list of Accountability Techniques we’ve accumulated, two things have stood out to me. One is the dependence on time. The other is how much other people play into our accountability for our own personal projects.

The techniques that involve other people are accountability buddies, accountability groups, classes, scheduling meetings for accountability, public and internet accountability, the SPUR technique, finding a job, and a rival’s challenge.

To me, the strongest accountability we can have involves least one other person. Why is that? Why are we so much more likely to be accountable to others rather than ourselves?

Here’s why I think this is the case. Any mental health professional can feel free to correct me.

The Guilty Party

Humans are social creatures at the core. We don’t want to be excluded or cast out; we want to feel accepted. When we feel guilt, we feel we’ve done something wrong, something that could cause us to not be accepted. 

Accountability uses this fear of guilt to our advantage. When we share our accountability with someone else, we create a possibility of disappointing that person. If we don’t accomplish what we said, we’ll feel guilty about it because someone else was expecting it from us. We move strongly away from a potential feeling of guilt.

We must be specific in order for accountability to work properly. Telling our best friend, “I’m going to write a book” sounds like an accountability statement. However, in the courtroom of our minds, we’ll be free from guilt due to technicalities. We didn’t say when we would write the book. We also know our best friend will give us a free pass if we blame our busy lives. The techniques linked above demand more specific goals and particular relationships in order to create accountability that can drive us forward.

Praise Be, Too

Humans also move toward praise and reward. If we complete the goal that we shared with others, we anticipate congratulations. We’ll be seen as a “good” person. We’ll be seen as someone who follows through and is dependable.

I have less to say about moving toward a positive outcome, and that’s appropriate. Humans are much more motivated to avoid the negative than to strive for the positive.

It’s not Me, It’s You

Another aspect of human nature is to prioritize other people’s problems over our own. We’re empathetic. We see someone else’s suffering and we want to resolve it. When it comes to our own suffering, we feel like it is our burden to bear. We prioritize the group above ourselves. We’re trained to be accountable to other people from early in life. School and work constantly drive this value into us.

Accountability to others again uses this aspect of human nature to our advantage. If we externalize our goal so that someone else is observing, then we can feel that pressure of resolving “someone else’s problem.” We’ve made someone else the boss by promising them our accountability. We’ve made ourselves the worker who needs to complete the task at hand. 

When we are accountable only to ourselves, we can easily come up with excuses why we didn’t do what we intended. We are less likely to give excuses to another person; we’ll feel the empathetic pull to do what we said we would.

What’s Your Account?

Do you agree that accountability to others is more motivating that accountability to ourselves alone? Why do you think that is?