When a duck glides across the surface of a pond, it may appear to be effortlessly traversing the water, but in fact, its hidden feet are working overtime to keep it afloat. It is this contrast of outward calm and concealed exertion that inspired the term "floating duck syndrome". Beyond the name, it has very little to do with ducks, instead describing how individuals advertise their achievements and simultaneously mask the struggles underpinning them.

In a recent study, scientists investigated the phenomenon, its consequences – it can have a huge impact on our health and well-being – and potential solutions.

“An increasingly common phenomenon in modern work and school settings is individuals taking on too many tasks and spending effort without commensurate rewards,” the study authors write. “Such an imbalance of efforts and rewards leads to myriad negative consequences, such as burnout, anxiety, and disease.”

Attempting to explain how this disparity arises, the researchers investigated "floating duck syndrome", which describes the social pressure on individuals to celebrate their successes while hiding the toil behind them – much like a duck appearing to move effortlessly across the water. 

In doing so, these people create problematic social learning dynamics that lead others to underestimate the effort required to meet their goals. “This in turn leads individuals to both invest too much total effort and spread this effort over too many activities, reducing the success rate from each activity and creating effort-reward imbalances,” the team explain.

They built a mathematical model of social learning and, using students choosing activities as a case study, modeled a world wherein people try to judge how much effort to put into their work without full knowledge of how much effort it will take to succeed or how difficult the world is.

In the presence of visibility biases, such as people who appear effortlessly perfect, individuals in the model erroneously expected greater rewards for their effort than they actually received.

The team also identified that even if individuals had a greater absolute number of successes following increased overall effort, their success rate still went down, because they invested in too many activities.

“These findings matter. Modern life constantly calls upon us to decide how to divide our time and energy between different domains of life, including school, work, family, and leisure. How we allocate our time and energy between these domains, how many different activities we pursue in each domain, and what the resulting rewards are, have profound effects on our mental and physical health,” study author Erol Akçay of the University of Pennsylvania said in a statement.

And, perhaps unsurprisingly, the veneer of perfection that is presented to us on social media isn’t helping things. “Floating duck syndrome is often exacerbated by social media platforms and institutional public relations, which make successes more visible but not necessarily failures or the effort spent to achieve successes,” Akçay added.

So what can we do to combat the floating duck? Tackling the root cause is the way to go, the researchers conclude: we need to stop underreporting effort in social learning dynamics and foster a culture of openness when talking about our successes and failures. That way, we should become more aware of the work required of us and less likely to spread ourselves too thin chasing unrealistic perfection.

The study is published in the journal Evolutionary Human Sciences.