Today I was reminded how much a single line of genuine recognition can carry. I left a quick “nice work on the retry logic here, that edge case is easy to miss” on a PR, and the response told me it mattered more than the approval itself.
Transactional Analysis has a name for this: a stroke, a unit of recognition. Eric Berne’s claim is that we’re wired with recognition-hunger the same way we get hungry for food, and if we don’t get positive strokes we’ll unconsciously go fishing for negative ones, because being noticed badly still beats not being noticed at all.
That reframes a lot of team behavior. The engineer who keeps reopening settled arguments, the one who over-explains in standup, sometimes that’s not about the topic, it’s a stroke deficit. They’re getting attention the only way that’s reliably working.
The lever is cheap and most of us underuse it. A specific, honest stroke that names the actual thing they did well, not a blanket “great job,” feeds the hunger directly. A vague stroke reads as filler, but “you caught the off-by-one nobody else saw” lands because it proves you were paying attention. Code review is full of chances to give one, and I leave too many on the table.
